The Children of Time
by Dreamingsinger
Summary: Five years after her last adventure, Hailey Andrews is back. This time she finds herself traveling with the eleventh Doctor.  What if fate and all of time itself have more in store for her than was ever before known?  More Than Meets the Eye Sequel
1. Chapter 1

**A/N; This story, which will be in a good number of chapters, but I'm not sure exactly how many yet, is a continuation of the last big I fanfiction I did. You will notice early on though that much has changed, as of course things will as a good bit of time passes. As for the title 'The Children of Time' well you'll just have to read for a while and keep up with this one in order to understand that title. It will soon become very obvious though what that means. If you haven't read 'More Than Meets the Eye' yet, this one will have a few major things that just won't make much sense at all. I'd recomend you read that one first. **

With her hearts both pounding hard in her chest, and their beats echoing in her ears, Hailey Andrews raced onto her ship. She slammed the door behind her and as quickly as she could, she locked it. She rushed to the control console and struggling to catch her breath, she plotted the ship into the time vortex. Gasping, and laughing, and shaking her head in disbelief at her narrow escape, she finally fell into her chair in the control room as her knees gave way, shaking with shocked relief.

It was not typical of Tessilons to attack out of nowhere, like the ones she had just managed to escape from had done. Small and lightweight and only semi-intelligent as far as the intelligence of species went, the creatures could use simple tools well enough, but were generally timid and used those tools mainly for hunting and survival.

She wondered why she had so suddenly found herself surrounded by two dozen small furry pink creatures, their heads barely reaching past her waist, but nearly all of them waving sharp pointed wooden spears toward her. Her tried and trusted trick of escaping up a tree and from there jumping down across to the far side of the clearing from one of it's long overhanging branches had gaining her enough of a head start, that though she was chased immediately, she made it back ahead of the little primitive aliens. Something must have frightened the small tribe, she knew, but what? Had a female perhaps felt that her newly born young one was threatened, and in her panic instigated the sudden frenzy? No, that made no sense, Hailey realized as sitting down and slowly feeling herself grow calmer, she mentally reviewed all she knew about the Tessilons, of Matraxian Jarvo. It was winter on that planet at the time she'd landed, and all Tessilon young were born in the spring. There would be no newborns among them, only older babies and that would not have caused quite that reaction over a visitor who showed no harmful intent. In any case, she was not sure that even had their been tiny babies among them, anyone would normally have attacked. It was just not their way.

Hailey's TARDIS tumbled through the vortex aimlessly, and she let it drift peacefully for a long while, as she sipped a cup of tea and though back over the last few hours again. As the last of her panic over the incident with the Tessilons wore off, she smiled to herself and let her ship drift as it would. Slowly she got up from her chair and made her way to the main bathroom down the lower floor hallway.

She started the water in the large bathtub running on a low setting, and turned the taps so that the temperature was the warmest she liked it. Looking forward to a good warm soak in her tub, she hurried across the hall to her bedroom to fetch her things. She found herself sitting for a brief moment on her bed, on top of pink and red checkered quilt looking at the photograph she picked up from on the top of the little wooden nightstand. Her mother and herself both smiled from inside the frame decorated with white flowers.

In the photograph, both of them stood in front of a stack of yellowish hay bales on a farm belonging to the friend and neighbor. They looked so typical, just like any mother and daughter might be expected to look in some random photograph taken that the spur of a moment. George had taken that photo during a small outdoor get together at their neighbor's place, and of course looking at it no one would guess at the the trouble and confusion the family had faced over the years. Hailey reached over to slowly set the framed picture back down on her night stand. She smiled for a moment, before she shook her head, her own emotions confusing her.

"Mum, if only you could see me now," she said out loud to no one. "You wouldn't have known what to make of those Tessilons today. Of course Kathie and Jake would probably have just laughed at first."

With another shake of her head, she crossed the hall again to her bathroom. Throwing her clothes into a messy pile of bright colors and striped fabric, she climbed into the tub and let herself fall gratefully back into the nearly hot water and sweetly scented bubble bath.

~DW~DW~DW~DW~DW~

Almost clear across the Milky Way galaxy, on the planet Earth, the Doctor started his own ship onto motion once more. Pressing several buttons and then throwing a few switches before finally typing in a set of multi letter and number co-ordinates, he took a step back from his controls. For the first time in what felt like so long he was traveling on his own again. He'd had friends leave for days or weeks before of course, but now he was truly along again. He shook his head sadly and vowed to visit his friends someday. He reminded himself though just as soon as the thought had come to mind, that though he so often planned to visit former companions when possible, it was very rate that he ever actually did so.

He supposed, as he walked away slowly, that he would just have to find a new companion or two. After all, he'd been shown so many times that he just could not spend forever on his own. But it wasn't always that easy to just find someone new to take along with him. It was always a certain and special kind of human being who was actually capable of doing it well enough, of not falling dead from terror on alien planets, of constantly seeking the next adventure and rarely stopping. He understood that he shouldn't bother to even really look, or least not look too hard. Even after all of his long years of traveling, eventfully ideal travel companions had a way of falling into his life in some way or other. He knew that in the mean time he would just travel alone and be fine with that.

He sat down in the console room, with his feet up on the controls, and opened a book he had left laying around. Happily he opened the book, found his place, marked by a simple Barns and Noble bookmark, and began to read. Soon he was so absorbed in his reading about the newest theories in the world of particle physics that several hours passed unnoticed.

The high pitched chiming or a small bell on the console, and green and blue blinking of a few little lights near the back of control panel finally got his attention. He dropped the book to the floor, startled by the sudden chiming noise and within even realizing he'd dropped it at all, he jumped to his feet. Taking a quick step forward he stepped right on the open paperback and nearly ended up tripping and falling because of it. He kicked the book across the room by accident as he tried to take another step. Finally he made his way to the console and looked over everything, working out the reason behind the chiming and the blinking.

"It can't be," he muttered out loud to no one, as the reason for the noise and lights started to make sense. he started to pace a little. "A distress call, sure. But from a..."

He stopped speaking right in the middle of his train of thought and stood still where he had stopped. Tuning his focus inward a bit he began to hear the telepathic voice of his ship. She was saying nothing really of much importance, except urging him to action. "Go, quickly Doctor. We must go now. We must fly."

For another moment the Doctor only stood where he was, nearly frozen to the spot with disbelief, concern, excitement, fear, and so many other emotions he could not even put a name to so fast. Around him and echoing through his head, he could sense his ship's feeling of urgency. She wanted to fly off after the source of the signal, but for once she was waiting for his permission to move. That was new, he mused and had the situation been slightly different he might have laughed to find that now after all the years she'd been his ship, now she finally listened. He made a quick decision, though he knew it was hardly a choice as there was no way he'd have even made a different choice.

"Okay girl," she told his ship out loud, not even bothering that time to feel silly for talking to it out loud. He released the handbrake and right way moved to hold onto the front of the console. "You're right. let's go find her. You know where to go. Let's go find Hailey again."

The second he get go of the brake and long before he even finished speaking, the TARDIS took off through the vortex moving at its fastest possible speed. The Doctor trusted his ship entirely. Years of experiencing nearly everything possible and some that he would never have believed possible had he not seen it himself had taught him to trust her only sense of reason and logic, to let her figure some things out herself. She was far more than just a machine.

~DW~DW~DW~DW~DW~

Hailey climbed out of the tub. She wrapped a big red towel around herself and another smaller white one around her dripping hair. Reaching into the tub, she let the water out, and then sat for a moment on the edge of the bath drying herself off. She pulled out a change of clothes, these ones a pair of jeans, a pink and green polka-dotted long sleeve top and a black vest, and as she stood in front of the bathroom mirror drying her hair a bit, she wondered how she might like to spend that evening. She made her way to her bedroom, and sat on her bed using her blow dryer and thinking about leaving her ship floating in space while she spent a quiet night watching romantic comedies. She reflected a little sadly that sometimes, more than ever in recent times, she no long felt like doing as much as she once had.

Her hair nearly dried, she made her way to the sitting room upstairs, happily selected a few movie disks from the cupboard under the television stand, and flopped down onto the comfortable sofa to watch a new one she had not yet gotten around to seeing. Her attention was caught up in the film, and the ringing of an alarm bell in the control room startled her right out of her content movie viewing.

Jumping up from the sofa in an instant, Hailey raced from the sitting room, and into the hall. She hurried up the stairs and made her way into the console room just as the ship unexpectedly rocked sideways with such force that she was knocked off her feet. Her arm banged painfully against the handrail just before she managed to catch herself and stop herself tumbling right down the steps. Carefully, holing tightly to the railing along the edge of the room as the ship continued to move dangerously, she made her way to the control console. Quickly transferring her hold to that from the railing, she stood for a brief second stunned and shaking and confused.

"What's the matter now?" she mumbled out loud, looking over the controls and at the many lights that had suddenly began to blink erratically. The alarm that had starting to ring before was still ringing and ringing and the sound was growing louder and more urgent. Hailey looked over everything and then checked it all again. the checks and double checks took only a minute at most, but in that time, the shaking of the ship had grown worse and become a steady feeling of turbulence, which grew ever rougher.

The TARDIS provided what information it could quickly on the monitor, and Hailey read fast, comprehending and trying to make her best decisions in a hurry. The ship had left the part of space in which she'd left it, above the world of Matraxian Jarvo, and of it's own accord it had made it's way to a completely new part of the galaxy. She realized in a moment of terrible panic that she did not ever know where it was it all. It had taken her somewhere that was nowhere within the maps she'd so far committed to memory. She could have simply pulled up new maps on the computer and figured it out quickly enough of course, but with all the shaking and lights and the ringing of the alarm, that moment was hardly the time for that.

She was very close to a planet that the computer told her was roughly Earth-like and life sustaining. As for any life on it, there was no known information. The ship was falling trough the atmosphere fast and gaining speed as it did so. She had no idea what had caused her ship to fall out of the air and then right way begin the decent, but she did know she couldn't stop it. She checked the monitor again as she tried once more in vain to force the ship to balance itself and begin to slow down. She held out hope that she might still avert a severe wreck, but that hope faded fast as something big crashed into the side of the ship. She couldn't see the object on the monitor - it had come from behind out of sight range, and caught her completely by surprise - but she suddenly realized what it had been that had caused that first initial tilt. Some type of something big was hitting the outside of the ship, and she finally realized that.

With a scream of fright and shock, she lost her footing as she ran into another impact. She struggled to catch herself but in the confusion of a second before she'd taken a couple of unintentional steps backward. With nothing in front of her close enough within her reach, she had nothing to grab hold of to get her footing. Her next instantaneous move was to try turning around but everything was happening to fast. She flipped backward over the railing and landed hard, half sideways on the floor nearly seven feet below.

~DW~DW~DW~DW~DW~

The Doctor took off running the second his TARDIS had landed and he'd pushed open

it's door. After a few minutes or running forward he stopped in what appeared to be the middle of a rocky semi-desert landscape, with dark and course sand for miles in any direction. He looked around a bit and saw only the sand and the huge jagged and strangely colored rocks everywhere. For a second he felt panic starting to arise, and he stubbornly refused to allow that to happen. It was not like him to just start to panic over what could still so likely be nothing.

He had always been able to sense the presence of any other Time Lords over a relatively long distance, when he consciously tried to do so, and for the first time ever it occurred to him to wonder if he could sense Hailey too. For a moment he felt silly to think that he had never actually tried before, but of course he just simply had not. Of course there had been no need for it while had traveled with him, as she was most often nearby. And after she had left he had broken almost all connection to her fast. He regretted that now more than ever. He shook off feelings of great and sudden sadness as for the first time, he tried to sense her over an unknown distance.

It was all silence and emptiness at first. He'd not actually tried purposefully to sense another of his own people in so long a time. And of course the one was trying to sense now was partly human, and he knew that if it could work at all, that fact would make it harder to do. Slowly though he began to find the presence of someone other than himself within his awareness. He sensed it very nearby, to the west. It was a weak mental signal though of course just as he thought it would be. Trying to sense her was nothing like the strong and infinitely powerful minds he's once sensed all around him endlessly in years gone by. In the next instant though he was off and running to the west as fast as he could. It had occurred to him that the weak telepathic signal had to do with much more than just Hailey being partly human. He knew she must also have been somehow knocked unconscious.

Running over the ground and making his way over and around a few big rocks, he finally managed to spot something quite perfect out of place amid the otherwise undisturbed landscape. Down belong the place he stood, at the bottom of a low grade cliff and resting at a horrible angle and nearly upside down was something that looked strangely like typical cable truck from 21st century Earth. he knew at once that he had found Hailey's TARDIS. He could only hope he had also found Hailey along with it.

The Doctor found the door to former companion and student's time ship unlocked and with great relief he hurriedly stepped inside. His relief turned to dread as he took in the look of the mess the inside of the ship was in. He had thought several times over many years of travels and near disasters, that his own ship had found itself in bad shape more than once. The state of this one though concerned him. The console room was in ruin, with piece of the ceiling either having falling completely into piles of wreckage, or still hanging and ready to fall any second. The room was full of thick nearly black smoke, and the lights flickered dimly. There had once been a waist high railing circling the room and dividing it off from a couple of stairwells, but that railing was mostly in pieces now, and sections of it were scattered over the floor of the level below.

He turned at once and carefully as he dared, he made his way down the now almost entirely unstable stairwell leading downward. He took his sonic screwdriver from his jacker pocket and holding it in front of him, he tried to use it;s light to see through the smoke. It didn't work as well as he had hoped it would. he also started to find that aside from dangerously obstructing is vision in a place filled with hazards, it also made it more and more different to breathe. Half way down the steps, on a small landing on which he almost miss-stepped and fell he found the controls that contained among other things, the ventilation fans. Those he found still worked and the smoke thankfully began to disappear through the vents near the top of the ship.

On the floor very close to the bottom of the staircase, he found Hailey laying underneath some of the fallen wreckage from above. Her both of her legs and feet were trapped under what could only have once been the ceiling. On top of that were several large bricks that had once been part of an inner wall and small parts of the railing, as well as other pieces of scrap metal wood and plastic. She was knocked out and her face was bloody.

The Doctor struggled to uncover her as quickly as he could, but some of the bits and pieces that had fallen down where almost too heavy to move without help. He succeeded though, and as soon as he dropped to his knees beside her to look her over, she opened her eyes unexpectedly.

"What happened?" she mumbled, trying to turn her head to look around. Returning almost fully to consciousness she tried to sit herself up and move. She screamed out loud with pain and for a second she lay perfectly still, too stunned to move at all.

When she tried then to rolled a little to one side trying to find a comfortable position, the Doctor stopped her with a motion of his hands. "No, no don't do that. We have no idea yet how badly you've been hurt."

"How did you get in here?" Hailey mumbled next. She stopped moving and only looked up in more confusion than before. "You knew to turn on the ventilation fans, and where to find the panel. How did you do that?"

"Well our ships are not that different really. Yours may be a little newer but it's still all basic knowledge."

"What are you talking about?"

"The main life support control panels. They are always in basically the same place. They have to be. Safety feature."

"Who are you?" Hailey questioned in a strange tone somewhere between mistrust, panic, and even more confusion.

For one brief moment, the Doctor was greatly concerned about a very possible head injury. Certainly the fact that she clearly had no idea who he was, was something to be concerned about. He was about to question her on basic knowledge in order to get an idea of her level of coherence, when he realized the obvious and shook his head at his own momentary lack of logic and common sense. Of course she didn't have a head injury, and if she did happen to have one, it was certainly not something that had caused her to lose her memory. She simply didn't recognize him because he looked completely and entirely different now than he had the last time she'd seen him.

"You know who I am, Hailey," he said slowly, but before he could finish what he had started to say, she looked around again nervously.

"How do you know my name?"

He looked right at her calmly, and said, "because you told years ago when you first introduced yourself. I know your Gallifrayan name too, because you told me that as well once."

"Wh...what...?" Hailey looked afraid for a moment as confusion nearly got the better of her. For a second she looked as if she would cry from the fear of finding herself in a situation she could not either understand or get herself out of. She did begin to cry then, but not for that reason at all. She looked up at him with relief and disbelief through tearstained eyes.

"Doctor," she cried, "how can you...? You came back to help me!"

"Of course I did," was the Doctor's only reply. Very gently and lightly his hands moved over her, touching parts of her back and neck first and then her legs and arms. She just lay still and half asleep, forcing her eyes to stay open.

"It's as safe as it ever can be" he said after a moment. "I'm just going to move you, alright?"

Hailey nodded slowly. "Where are we going?"

The Doctor very carefully but quickly lifted her into his arms and stood up. "I'm taking you back to my TARDIS. I left it somewhere around here. A quick run across a desert planet. Just like old times, hey?"

He was rambling on trying to keep her conscious, as he ran up the stairs as fast as he could while carrying her. Her eyes were barely open, but it was clear she was ready to fall into sleep. He just went on talking as he ran out rocky ground towards his own ship. "You haven't been around in a while. My whole ship looks so different now. It's amazing. I'm sure you'll love the new interior. She had to rebuild some time ago but..."

"You look so different too," Hailey said quietly.

"Yeah," the Doctor said, laughing slightly. He was just glad to find she was obviously still quite awake, and clearly paying attention. "Bit of a long story there. Remind me to tell it sometime."

He ran through the doors of his ship, and though he was not quite sure that's where they needed to be, he took her straight to the medical bay. She began to cough a little as he gently put her down on the narrow bed, and she moved her hands so that both were covering her stomach. the Doctor, who had turned around for only a moment to look for a medical scanner, turned back to her and right away he hurried closer.

"Hailey," he said urgently, "what's the matter?"

"It just hurts," Hailey answered weakly. Her eyes were much more open now and she was looking at him helplessly. He waved the scanner over her and shook his head a little.

"Not good at all," he muttered to himself, and Hailey's eyes grew wider in fright.

"What?" she asked quickly. "Is this very bad?"

"Hold on, I need to run further scans. It's alright, just hold still."

"Doctor," Hailey said, suddenly as a new realization occurred to her. "What will happen to my ship? It's a living consciousness. This can't be good!"

"She will rebuild. She coudln't try to do that while you were still on board but now it will as quickly as it can."

Hailey shut her eyes then and stayed where she was without trying to move. For the moment she also said nothing more. The Doctor scanned her again, this time using a more advanced and detailed scanner, and he frowned in concern. Once again he shook his head, and was thankful that this time she didn't see him. She very soon began to groan in pain, but she didn't bother to open her eyes. He feared she was in serious trouble, but of course he said not a thing about any of that. He only took a moment to speak to her, saying not much of anything, but muttering assurances. Promptly, he turned his urgent attention to the consciousness of his ship.

"She is in terrible condition," he said telepathically.

The ship's own telepathic voice replied at once with calmness. "Yes. That much is known. I am saddened by the situation, but the bigger picture is the one we must look at, not the immediate one."

"I know."

"She will be alright. She will live, but of course you must know that."

"Can she really survive this? The matter of a human parent makes it a different kind of case."

If the TARDIS could have nodded, the Doctor knew from the emotions she was sending forward, that she would have done exactly that.

"Her own ship is currently disabled," he said to her, still entirely without speaking out loud. "My hope now is simply that you can assist her, as her own TARDIS is unable to at the present time."

"Of course I will," the consciousness of the the ship answered. She said nothing more and offered no more in the way of direction either.

"Doctor," Hailey mumbled quietly. She tried unsuccessfully to fight back tears of pain. "Please... help me. I feel terrible."

"Heavy panels falling on top of you is certainly never a good situation," the Doctor said. he tried to hold onto a calm tone of voice, but he wasn't quite sure if he was succeeding or not. "I think that would likely have killed a human almost instantly. You are quite a bit stronger than humans though so you stood more of a chance."

"This is bad. Everything hurts and I can barely feel my lower legs and feet."

"There's been some severe nerve damage. Just stay calm. It'll be alright. Hailey," the Doctor said quickly, trying not to show the panic that his conversation with the ship had caused him. "I want to give you a bit of pain medication, but I really don't want to medicate you without your permission, while you're coherent enough to give it."

She looked at him for a second as though trying to make sense of his simple words. Finally she just nodded her head slightly, and tried to speak. She said nothing though and began to fall closer to unconsciousness.

"Doctor, am I dying?" she asked after a couple of silent moments in which she lay still with her eyes closed, and he turned his back on her to quickly fetch warm covers and various other things from a cabinet across the room. Her eyes snapped open again and she just stared at him with a look of pain and questioning.

"No. No, of course you aren't," he said, turning around quickly. He ran back to her and dropped the things he carried onto the end of the bed. The Doctor looked at his companion intently for a moment, silently asking her with only the look in his eyes to trust him more than she ever had before. She looked like she had had so many far better days, and he knew that she indeed had. For a moment he thought back to his most vivid memories of her in the times years before that she'd traveled with him. He recalled her running along a narrow foot bridge on a distant world somewhere, laughing and shouting something about a green dog chasing a cat bigger than itself. Her hair, which back then had been streaked with vivid shades of pink and blue, flowed loosely behind her in the wind, and it was her colorful clothing that made her so obvious from the ground.

He almost smiled at little to himself remembering her walking slowly into his console room, in the black and while Academy clothing he'd left at her door, ready for the events of the night that she first became a true Time Lord. She looked so nervous and shaky, but so determined not to run, though he knew he'd have easily let her had she tried. He recalled a time he'd seen her laughing at some nonsense she picked up on her short-wave radio. It was so pointless and silly of a thing to so clearly recall, but somehow he did nonetheless.

"You aren't dying," he said to her forcing himself back to the present moment. Hailey looked at him with an expression he could not quite read. She opened her mouth, intending to question him, but she could make barely a sound at all.

"It's alright," the Doctor said. He turned around to face the sink very close by and filled a cup with cold water. He held it to her mouth and she gratefully accepted it and drank a little. After a couple of small sips she shook her head slightly, After putting the cup down again, he just stood with one of her hands gently between both of his. He stood for another moment looked down at her and simply remembering her the way he's known her, years before. For a second he fought back regret over the realization that he would so be getting to know here all over again, and this time it woudl be practically getting to know someone brand new.

He forced himself to fake a look of confidence. "You're about to regenerate, likely very soon."

"I... wait... what?" Hailey mumbled. She opened her eyes wider and stared at him in shocked disbelief. For several moments she didn't even try to say anything, but her eyes said so much. Her expression was one of fear and curiosity, of panic and trust. She looked ad though she clearly wanted to laugh and say he couldn't be serious, yet at the same time, she looked ready to cry from the enormity of this huge unknown.

"I... I can do that?" She asked, almost disbelieving but sure he meant it entirely.

"It would appear so," the Doctor said. "I wasn't sure myself, though it's not a thought that crossed my mind more than a time or two. According to the scans though your body has gone right into the first and then second stages with little trouble."

Hailey looked as though she had so much to say but knew she had so little time to say it all. after another brief moment in which she better processed an understanding of her situation, she only said in a quiet voice, "so this is all real then."

"Yeah," the Doctor answered honestly. His tone was one of complete seriousness.

**A/N; lol, yeah I still love my occasional cliff hangers. I'll get back to you with an update in the next few days if all works out as I hope. Please, R&R. **


	2. Chapter 2

"Doctor!" Hailey screamed. Her tears ran from her eyes, and she gasped and sniffled, trying hard to stop crying. Her hands shook and she fought hard to stop that too. "Please help me."

The Doctor, who had hurried across the med bay moments before to look helplessly through a cupboard in search of some inspired idea of how to assist his companion, turned around instantly and hurried back to her again.

"Okay, okay," he said. "Don't panic. You're still fine."

"No no no," Hailey cried. "It's not okay. I.. I'm... My head hurts. Everything hurts so much.. I... can't, I can't..."

It had been at least a couple of hours since the Doctor had first carried her back to his ship and put her down in the med bay. Still she was close to death but alive, and in increasing pain. The process of regenerating was a much slower one than was common, but such things were not completely unheard of. Not entirely unheard of of course, but not exactly typical either. Hailey just went on crying and screaming, and all the while so obviously trying not to do any more of either.

In the time they'd been onboard the Doctor's ship, she'd slept a bit but only for very brief periods at once. She tended to doze off lightly, only to wake up minutes later mumbling only half coherently and trying to move to get comfortable but, unable to do that. Sometimes she would speak a bit, but even in those minutes it was mostly just confusion and pain that came through in her idle words.

He sat with her for a while, holding onto one of her hands, and rambling on about some planet or other that he'd found himself on recently, trying to keep her busy listening to him until finally she went back to sleep again. Her eyes finally remained shut and she looked to be soundly sleeping, but he knew she may well wake up again in a short time. He hoped that she would, only because all knowledge told him she was better off awake at that point. At the same time though, he thought it might be okay to hope she remained asleep instead.

While everything was quiet this time, he turned his attention once again to the consciousness of his ship.

"Please," he whispered to her mentally. "I need insight."

The ship's consciousness, ever present in his head but generally silent unless either purposefully taken notice of, or in urgent need of his attention, waited patiently for him to say more.

"I need to understand... is Hailey okay? I tell her she is, because how could I say anything else. However I am beginning to have my doubts."

"She is still fine," the ship answered calmly and seriously. "You know I could never lie to you though, both the programming of the multi-dimensional matrix, and my own sense of right never did allow for that."

"This is true. You always have been completely honest whenever directly questioned. So please, be completely honest now. I sense there is more to your answer, something that you are not telling me."

"Hailey cannot exist much longer in her current state. If her physical structure does not rebuild soon, she will very likely die."

"So what's stopping her from regenerating in the first place?" The Doctor started to feel true panic of his own now, and even using only his mental voice he knew it must have showed clearly. "I was starting to become hopeful enough to assume that perhaps she was not quite fatally injured after all. Of course to assume she was, and later find I was wrong would be a serious mistake on my part, but I can be wrong. I've been wrong before. Never have a made a mistake so dangerous but..."

"Doctor!" the TARDIS interrupted his thoughts sharply.

"What?"

"You are rambling again," the ship said. She sounded mildly assumed despite the seriousness of the situation before them. "Even telepathically you ramble and get so badly and hopelessly sidetracked!"

He would have laughed in so many far less terrible and pressing situations. In that moment though he simply asked urgently, "so what is it really that's stopping her. Is it the matter of her human mother?"

"Human DNA has much less to do with this than it might logically seem. She gained the potential to access her full range of Gallifrayan biological functions when she began to learn and train years ago."

"So then what's happened? Who or what has interfered?"

The ship's answer was a shock. "She herself is interfering."

"That's impossible. Why do that?"

"Doctor, it isn't as though she even has any idea she's doing that."

"It just seems unlikely..."

"Take a brief moment to recall a few of your less than willing regenerations." If the TARDIS had been a person, she'd likely have either rolled her eyes or smacked him, perhaps even both, as she continued on with her statement. "I am forced to site the most recent as a perfectly practical example."

The Doctor, probably against his better judgment, choose to ignore his ship after that.

Hailey was staring at him, when he turned his full attention back to her. She was quite wide awake again, likely more awake this time then she had been before. This time though she made no sound at all. She just looked at him, with a look of curiosity and even slight calmness.

"Hello again," he said to her. "You slept for a bit this time. Not more than ten minutes but still that's not bad considering."

"Hmm," was Hailey's only reply.

"You okay?" the Doctor asked. Instantly he felt foolish for asking that of all things. Of course she was not simply okay. Since waking up again however, she had been mostly quiet instead of starting to scream again. He was convinced that somehow that had to be a good sign of something.

"Yeah. Just kind of... scared."

"What are you afraid of?' he asked next. The information the TARDIS had provided made a good degree of sense and having found an opening, he was determined to help his Companion to work things out for herself.

"I wonder if I'll still love colors," Hailey mused out loud after many silent minutes and after he'd stopped wondering if she would speak again. "There are all those little things that make us ourselves. I hope I can hold onto many of mine. I... want to still like wearing rainbow running shoes and sitting on grass."

The Doctor only held her hand tightly and idly brushed her hair behind her ear as he looked around for a minute in uncertainty. He waited to see if she could calm herself again, and found that mostly out of exhaustion, she quickly did.

"Do you suppose I'll still be able to paint?" She asked him. "Will I even want to anymore? Art is kind of just what I've always done."

He decided once again to be honest and tell her the truth in the best way he could. "Things like that are impossible to tell. There is no real rhyme or reason to how those parts of a personalty are rebuilt. Don't worry though. It sounds weird now, I know, but all the things you do lose you'll hardly miss really."

"How can that... that doesn't make any sense... I'm so afraid." Hailey cried a little bit then, and the Doctor simply remained standing very close by, waiting for her to speak again, and thought of what he might say next. When she said nothing after a couple of long minutes, he finally dared to speak, not knowing if he was helping or making everything worse.

"It's impossible to explain. That whole idea of losing so much of what you once were, of not really minding that or caring. Perhaps one day you will know how to explain it properly, but I was never very good at wrapping my head around such things. All I know is that you will have so much that's new to get to know and to experience. It's exciting in some strange way."

Hailey looked at him with teary eyes. "I don't know what to do."

She was having more and more trouble catching her breath. She fought to breath comfortably, and the effort of struggling for enough air triggered a fit of coughing. Reacting quickly, and in somewhat of a panic he pulled her over onto her side just as she began to throw up blood onto the edge of the bed and the floor. Of course, given the extent of her injuries, it made sense that this happened, but still it was horrifying.

"It's okay," the Doctor said, allowing the sadness in his voice to show. "Just try to take a few deep breaths very slowly."

She did as he told her, and then reached up slowly with her eyes unfocused, looking for him. She lay still on her side with her head at the edge of the bed with her eyes closed, holding onto one of his hands and clearly not willing to let go. Hailey's state may have been greatly weakened, but still, she was far more fully awake then he had seen her in the past couple of hours. The pain was clearly beginning to fade now if only a slight bit, and she looked far more comfortable. That he was glad to see of course, but he could also see the fear still on her face. With a few tears of relief, that he would have been unable to hide from her had her eyes not been closed, he understood gratefully that the whole ordeal was finally almost over with. Speaking quietly so as not to startle her, he told her so.

She opened her mouth to say something, but unexpectedly she began coughing again instead. More blood everywhere, and she groaned and mumbled in discomfort, fright and even embarrassment. Once again the Doctor tried hard to calm her and this time he was surprised to find he was quite successful at it. Gently making her let him go, he turned to the sink, where he soaked a washcloth under the tap. He turned back and carefully wiped blood from her mouth, one of her hands and anywhere else he could find it. It seemed a somewhat pointless thing to do all things considered, but no harm of course in trying to give her as much dignity as he could.

"I remember reading something in my old textbooks once years ago on the subject of regeneration," Hailey said. Her voice was far quieter now, and her state quite obviously weakened just by the last moments alone. "I can hardly remember anything I read now."

"That's alright,' the Doctor answered, trying his hardest to come across as being very calm and collected about the whole matter. "I never seem to either. We were taught to remember, but that's easier said than done in the moment."

Hailey sounded calmer than he'd seen and heard her since finding her in the wreckage of her console room. "Is there really meant to be so much blood though? This can't be good."

"It isn't as bad as it looks. Just stay laying like that for a while now."

"I'm such a mess," Hailey muttered back. She tried to move a little. The Doctor gently and but firmly stopped her from moving by holding onto her with both of his hands. His young companion began to calm again as soon as she felt safe once more.

"I guess I should just look at this as a new kind of adventure, huh?" she muttered slowly and with surprising confidence.

"Yeah," the Doctor answered, with confidence of his own.

"Doctor," Hailey said very quietly, her voice weak and unsteady. "I feel so strange. I feel like I'm drifting."

"Good, good," the Doctor replied quietly. "That could be a good sign."

"Okay."

"Whatever happens, don't try to fight the process of biological change."

As soon as the Doctor let go of Hailey's hand, she lifted it and then the other one up in front of her. Opening her eyes again, she gasped in shocked surprise to see that both hands were glowing with orangy-yellow light. Her mouth fell open as though she was going to speak again, but no sound came out. She only looked around anxiously for the Doctor, and tried unsuccessfully to sit up a bit. He made sure to stand a safe distance away, but also to remain within her view. Calmly he urged to to lay back down and not to move again. She complied, but she just looked completely horrified. Once again he wished he could help her, but helpless and on the verge of tears, he knew there was so little he could do.

He thought back to the first time he had ever regenerated. Of course that had been so many long years ago, in fact several centuries, if he did the math right. He'd been just as inexperienced and as uncertain as her and for the first time he found himself glad to have been pretty much completely unconscious that fist time. To be quite fully awake had always been so much harder. He found himself feeling terrible that Hailey was so aware of it all, even if the textbooks had always called so close to full consciousness ideal.

The possess from that moment went so fast, and for that he found himself thankful. In well under a minute his companion's body was hidden by yellowish light, and in well under a minute after that the glowing had receded again. Hailey's eyes had shut sometime during the course of those couple of minutes, but very quickly she opened them again and he found her looking at her as she stared back at him. She looked so different, like an entirely new person. It was only because he knew better, that he did not become confused himself. He couldn't help but worry though about how she would react when she learned just how much she had changed.

"Doctor?" Hailey called slowly. Her voice was quiet and shaky from both exhaustion and shock, but so far she sounded like she might just be be alright. He ran closer to her. At first she tried to sit up, but it was obvious by the way she instantly shut her eyes, that she was overwhelmed by dizziness. She gave up and for a second she just lay still where had been.

"I don't feel so good," Hailey mumbled, still finding her voice.

"I know," the Doctor answered. "I'm sorry, but things will be pretty miserable for at least today."

He tried to help her to sit herself up, but she didn't want to move much at all. Even in the worst of his own post regeneration states, he'd always quite willingly been fully aware for a at least a short time. Most, but not quite all of his people tended to be quite capable of that. It was that not quite all part of his reasoning that assured him she was still fine. And of course he had to keep in mind too that she never was as physically strong as most true Time Lords. The last few hours had been horrific on top of all else, and that quite logically made her current situation even worse.

"I'm freezing," she said quietly. She was shivering with cold and it seemed it was getting worse. The Doctor spent a moment thinking carefully and he remembered a couple of cases he had either witnessed or at least just heard spoken of on his home planet many years before. This situation he knew, was not entirely new or unheard of. It certainly was a rare effect of post regenerative trauma though. Her body was having a bit of trouble making some of it's biological functions catch up to itself as fast as it should. She still had not yet regained any ability to regulate body temperature, or to keep herself warm enough. He explained this calmly as he wrapped a warm blanket around her, but just as quickly he assured her she would soon be alright.

Hailey's eyes remained closed. Still laying in near the same position on her side, that she'd spent the past while in, she made a weak effort to place her hands between her knees. Trying to stay warm, she only continued to shiver from cold. The Doctor, standing nearby and observing her in slightly more concern than he knew was needed, understood that aside from the cold she was also shaking slightly more from shock than from much else. Surprisingly fast, she was asleep again and would stay that way for hours.

The Doctor spent most of what in London would have been the late hours of night sitting in a char reading a book and keeping a close eye on his companion. Though he'd thought and hoped at first he wouldn't need the scanner again, he scanned her a few times throughout the night. He covered her in several heavy blankets earlier on in her recovery, and when the scanner finally told him that her body heat was normal again, he took all but one from her worried about her actually overheating as her body continued to try to maintain it's temperature. The scanner though showed every time that she was perfectly fine. She was simply sleeping. after each time he bothered to scan her, he shook his head, felt paranoid, and sat back down to read shaking his head. He would however without fail feel a need within twenty minutes to scan her again just to see for sure that she was still alright.

After another such moment of needless doubt he sat back down, and opened his book to the page he'd last cornered to mark his place. This time he managed to enjoy his reading, and get himself truly involved in the book instead of consumed with his endless worries over nothing. Half an hour raced by unnoticed.

"What are you reading?" Hailey's voice pulled him quickly from his interest in the page he was intently studying. He jumped to his feet quickly and dropped the book carefully into the chair.

"Just some old science book," he said. "Nice to see you awake again. It's been hours. You feeling better?"

"I feel much better," Hailey answered. She sounded close to being happy, and certainly well rested. The Doctor noted with relief that she looked much better too. It was with a slight shock that he came to understand that the extreme paleness of her new body, was not it's intended state of health at all. She had gained a good bit of color. In curiosity he took notice of her eye color. He haden't noticed until then because her eyes were never open long enough. Green eyes, he observed with surprise. He wondered strangely if given the number of far greater changes, she would even think a thing about the difference in the eyes.

Slowly she sat up on the edge of the bed and for a moment she just looked around the room. She'd been in no state to really pay much attention to much detail until that moment, and now she was trying to really understand where she had been taken. The Doctor held a hand out to her, and taking it, she let him gently pull her to her feet. With her standing he waved the scanner over her again, due mostly to the same case of worry he'd felt all along. She rolled her eyes and a bit and laughed slightly, but took everything slowly as he led her from the room and down the hall. She was still a little unsteady on her feet.

The Doctor led Hailey into the sitting room and left her there alone sitting in an armchair while he quickly ran to make tea in the kitchen two doors down. When he returned with two steaming mugs and a plate of biscuits, she was sitting where he'd left her, and looking around in curiosity.

"Not a same room I remember at all," she said as he sat down in a chair close by. She took the cup he offered her and took a slow and careful sip. "The whole ship looks different now then?"

"No. Just some of the rooms. When she rebuilt this last time I must have spent weeks looking into all the rooms to see what had and hadn't been redone."

Hailey nibbled a biscuit, taking a couple of tiny experimental bites, "It's strange," she said. "I always hated anything strawberry flavored. I could never stand the stuff. For some reason though it seems I really like strawberry cream now."

The Doctor laughed, "there you go. See, just the first of so many small and some not so small details you have yet to relearn about yourself."

"This all feels so unreal. The crash seems a bit like a terrible dream." Hailey paused for a minute, took another drink from her teacup and shifted her position so that she sat back in the chair with her knees to her chest. She mused with uncertainty, "it's all just kind of hazy after that."

"What to do you remember?" the Doctor gently pressed her for information. "Or do you even want to talk about it at all?"

"I...I just remember first waking up still on board my ship. I knew it had crashed but I didn't know why. I still don't know that. Anyway after that I just remember a lot of pain and blood and being scared of the unknown."

"It's always scary at first. Understandably so of course."

"Perfectly understandable," Hailey said. "Doctor, I must admit, the first time I ever came upon a chapter dealing with regeneration my those old textbooks, I never could finish the chapter. I got through a couple of pages and shut the book. The whole idea just seemed so horrible. That night I had terrible nightmares. I don't quite remember those dreams now after so many years, but still it was just bad. That's why it seemed like I knew nothing. I almost never did eventually make it through that chapter in the textbook."

The Doctor got to his feet quickly and stepped closer to her. Looking at her intently and with understanding, he said, "I'm sorry. I didn't know..."

Hailey only smiled happily though and said, "It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The hours before were much worse."

The Doctor nodded sympathetically. After no more than a few seconds though he forced him to stop thinking of that, knowing it was likely just another scene that would haunt him endlessly in the form of nightmares.

"What might it have been that caused my ship to crash?" Hailey questioned then.

"I couldn't possibly even guess at that yet. Once it's done repairing itself and lets us in, we'll check the computers and try to work that out." The Doctor found himself more relieved than he thought he would be, to have something else of importance to think over.

Hailey looked down then at the sleeve of her top, noticing for the first time that her clothes no longer fit like they were supposed to. She was not much heavier at all, but she was a little bit taller and had an entirely different body shape. Her sleeves and pant-legs were a little shorter for her than she would have liked, and her polka-dot printed top fit a bit oddly over her shoulders. She was about to take note her black vest too, but then realized that at some point over the course of the day she'd somehow lost it.

"This isn't going to work," she said, sounding uterly bewildered as too how her clothes could just not fit right anymore.

The Doctor laughed. He found himself able to completely relate to her newest matter of concern. "There should be plenty in the wardrobe, that will fit you better. Why don't you go and have a look around in there."

"Still at the bottom of the lowest staircase?"

"Yeah."

Hailey got to her feet, but instead of racing off excitedly like the Doctor had expected she might do, she just made her way slowly from the room and paused in the doorway.

"Bit nervous about a new look," she admitted with a funny, confused look on her face. Quickly though she cheered up again, and turned to back to the door before hurrying out. "Oh well. I guess it'll all work out some way or other. Oh my... I don't even know what I look like yet. Now that's just a weird idea to try to wrap my head around!"

After hearing his companions feet make their way to the end of the hall and then down the first stairwell, before fading from earshot, the Doctor sat down to finish his cup of tea. He wondered for a second if he should have sent her off on her own to another part of the ship so soon, and if the stairwells posed an ever greater danger. But she did seem steady enough on her feet by then and of course he had to trust that her body was capable of as fast of a recovery as any other of his people. Now that he was alone again though, and left with his own thoughts he had to admit the events of the day had left him quite worn out, not only physical but emotionally as well.

"Well this is certainly far more of a change than I expected," Hailey said suddenly from the doorway. He had not even heard her run back. He looked up and saw that she now wore a long black sweater, and bright purple leggings, with a pair of black boots. She walked into the room and was about to sit in a chair again when she changed her mind and decided to stay standing for a bit.

"I have red hair," she exclaimed, in obvious surprise over the matter. "I've gained a couple inches in hight, which I'll call a good thing. I don't think I look so so young for my age anymore either, certainly another good thing. But red hair? Doctor, according to the books our appearances after regenerations are based partly on our family's genetic codes. I can't even think of any redheads in my family. I can't imagine how that actually happened. Actually there might not be any green eyes in my family either. See, that's that just another problem with such limited knowledge about ancestry... wow, I'm rambling. Sorry."

"That's okay," the Doctor only laughed.

"It's weird though, huh?" he continued. "Getting used to an entirely new appearance I mean. The personality is one thing and that can be bad enough, but your whole body changing too..."

"No one from back home would ever even recognize me now," Hailey said slowly, speaking thoughtfully. "Strangely I don't think that's as bad of a thing as it might seem."

"Doctor," she said after a few minutes of both saying nothing at all. "Is it safe outside?"

"Of course it's safe. We're on... oh I can't quite think of the planet's name now actually. But basically it's mostly just sand and rocks out there. As far as I can tell it's not got much life on it at all. Only small animals in this area. Do you want to go outside?"

"Yeah. I need to check on my ship."

"Yes of course. Good idea. It should have finished repairing by now. Let's go and see."

The two of them wandered outside together and stood for a moment on the sandy ground looking the landscape of rocks, cliffs and sparse plant life. A tiny red lizard scurried over Hailey's right foot and for a moment she look like she might jump backward in fright. But the Doctor assured her it was harmless and would never bite without very good reason. Their original intention to go and look at Hailey's TARDIS was forgotten for the moment, as the two found a big and well positioned rock at the bottom of a larger pile of them in the middle of the open space around them. Hailey climbed carefully to the top or the rock pile several meters from the ground.

"What are you doing that for?" the Doctor called, standing and the bottom and laughing slightly.

"No reason really," Hailey answered back. "Because I can, I suppose."

"Well come back down from there. You could lose your footing and slip."

"No I won't. I used to climb things like this easily all the time remember?"

Hailey finally did climb back down within a couple of minutes and openly stated her surprise and relief at finding she could still do it just as well.

"So where are you off to next?" she asked, sitting down on the rock and the bottom of the pile. "You must have been heading somewhere before you ended up detouring here."

"Nowhere really, not I thought I might visit a crystal planet in the next galaxy for a short while. I have to go back to Earth sometime too. For some reason it seems a given that I end up on Earth more than anywhere else. The human race just never seems to not need saving. I suppose now I'm really just waiting for the next big exciting thing that needs to be seen to be believed." The Doctor stepped back a bit from the rocks His friend was still sitting on and held out a hand to her again. "Want to came with me?"

Hailey stood up quickly and grinned. "You mean you'd really let me travel with you again?"

"It's getting lonely already. And who better than another of my own people?"

Hailey quickly nodded her agreement.

"Of course I'll go with you," she said.

**A/N; for some reason I had a good bit of trouble with this chapter. Actually It still not as well written as I'd have liked, but at some point I have to know when to stop being such a perfectionist that I get on my own nerves, when it comes to writing. Odd way to write a regeneration, I know - but I wanted to make this one unique. It's tricky, because in the series they all seem a bit different, but still there are certain aspects that have to stay the same in every case. **


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N; Not much action in this chapter. Well none at all really. Basically it's just a lot of Hailey and the Doctor catching up and discussing events of the years they were apart. It contains at least one very important revelation though, so I wouldn't recommend skipping over it. Chapter four is where it will really start to get interesting again. **

Hailey tossed and turned in her bed on board the Doctor's TARDIS. She turned to look at the clock set to show standard London time, and she frowned and then groaned in frustrated annoyance. If they had been in England instead of somewhere in the middle of space near Pluto, it would have been four in the morning. She'd gone to bed not long after midnight, and not yet gotten a wink of sleep. Just the fact that she'd been laying in bed wide awake for close to four hours was enough to make her grab a handful of the fabric of her pillow and snatch it up angrily. In frustration she plopped the pillow back onto the bed the other way around and smacked it with her hand a few times, both to fluff it up and to express her annoyance at her wakefulness when she knew she should have a bit of rest.

She lay back down, and with her face half buried in the pillow and her blanket pulled over her, she tried once again to fall asleep. She enjoyed relaxing in her bed, and tried to let her body doze off. Another half an hour passed. That soon become an hour and she was still awake. Finally she made up her mind to simply give up and get out of bed all together.

When Hailey wandered into the console room fully dressed and carrying a glass of milk, she found the Doctor underneath the console tightening bolts with a wrench. She leaned on the railing along the back of the room, took a drink from her glass and set it down on the rail. After a second she got bored and walked toward the monitor. She looked intently at the image on the little screen. They were still in space, as they had been all night - but now it was obvious they were out of her home solar system. The TARDIS drifted slowly past three moons of a small planet with striped rings of colored mist around it. Slightly further away the metal framework of a man made structure, long abandoned according to it's condition, floated in it's orbit near the edge of the system.

"You're up early," the Doctor called from under the console. Hailey was startled by suddenly hearing him say something, when she hadn't even realized he knew she was in the room at all. "Couldn't sleep again?"

"I've been awake all night," Hailey answered. She sat down in a chair near a main bank of controls and finished her milk. "It's been getting worse, you know? The trouble sleeping I mean. When I was a small child I'd sleep about half as much as others it seemed. When I first met you years ago, I was still sleeping several hours every few nights. It's just gotten so strange lately even for me."

"Do you feel tired though?" the Doctor questioned. He climbed out from under the console and walked across the room to sit with her.

"Yes, of course..." Hailey answered. As soon as she'd said it though, she realized just how quick she'd been to answer without even really thinking about it.

"Actually not really at all, strangely," she said after a brief of simply noticing how she felt. "I haven't slept in days and still I'm wide awake.

"You'll sleep when you get tired," the Doctor said. The tone of his voice and the look on his face told her that he was ever so calmly brushing the whole matter off, with little real concern for it.

"I've not been able to fall asleep since I recovered from the crash," Hailey protested. "And that was three Earth days ago!"

"You're getting closer to adulthood now. Soon enough you may find yourself sleeping literally only a few hours a month."

Hailey laughed, and then stopped and only looked at him in confusion. "Wait... closer to adulthood? Doctor, I've been an adult for years now."

"An adult human yes," the Doctor explained. "In Time Lord years though you're about the equivalent of a young teenager."

"That's just weird."

"How long has it been for you since we last saw each other?" the Doctor asked casually.

"Just over five years now."

"Hmm... okay so then that would make you just about..."

"Twenty six. How long was it for you?"

"Two and a half years for me."

"Exciting couple of years?" Hailey asked slowly. With one hand she tried to fix up her hair, that seemed to do exactly what she didn't want it to. It was much shorter than it had been before, barely reaching to her chin, and far more untamable.

"You could say that." The Doctor laughed and right away he changed the subject. "How about you though. I was surprised to find you out there so far from your home on your own. I suppose I just assumed you'd stay on and near Earth for a lot longer."

"So did I," Hailey answered. She pushed away her feelings of uncertainty and doubt and wondered how much she should say about whole matter. "Things happen though when we least expect them too." She looked at the floor, suddenly overcome with sadness and trying to hide it.

The Doctor looked at her in concern. "Hailey, did something happen in the past five years? Something terrible?"

"Yes," the young lady admitted. She quickly added more to her thought, speaking with determination to get her point across. "It's not what you must be thinking. I didn't get myself into any trouble and go on the run or anything."

"I didn't think you did. So really though, what's happened to you?"

"The last few years, they've been bad," Hailey explained, forcing herself to keep her voice from shaking as she relayed the events of the last while. "I lived in the house with my mother and George after you left me back on Earth. They had a decent basement, that they fixed up as a little suite they rented out to me. There is such limited housing in the village, but I wanted to stay there instead of the city for a while. Anyway about a year after they got married, I found out Mum was pregnant. I guess she was so sure I'd be happy to find out I was going to be a big sister or something. It just made me mad though. I couldn't believe that she'd actually plan on keeping and raising a baby at her age. She was over forty and I was already grown up. We had our first huge family fight that night. I told her I had no reason to be excited about having a little brother or sister when I was already at the age when many people my own age had babies of their own. I called them both careless for letting such an accident happen, and she explained that the baby had been planned."

"The next few months were pretty bad in the house. I thought she was so selfish for wanting another child when she'd given up on me so young. Every issue we'd gotten so close to resolving between us came up again and finally George started hinting that I might be better off moving out. I just thought he was irresponsible for getting my mother pregnant at almost middle age. I told him so and he said that as much as he loved me like his own daughter, he'd evict me himself if I said such a thing again. The first months or so after they shared their news were the worst of our lives."

"She seemed so happy though. They both did. They were always such a perfect couple really, but for a while I kind of forgot that. Slowly though I warmed up to the idea of a tiny sibling. She took me out for lunch one day and said it was a boy. We went shopping after that for little blue clothes and blankets. I remember that she never could decide what she wanted to call him. She said she'd know what he should be called when he was born, and so we all just called him 'the baby.'"

The Doctor looked at Hailey with dread on his face. The tone of her voice and her use of certain past tense where things should have been said in the present, told him that something had gone wrong in his companion's family. But for all of his talent at reading situations, he found he couldn't guess what it might have been. He just sat quietly and let her go on relaying the incident to him.

"One night when Mum was about seven months pregnant she and George went out," Hailey continued on. "He had some work thing to go to that night. Some party or something. I remember I was at home by myself painting and the hone rang. I just picked it up calmly thinking it must be a neighbor or something. But it was the hospital in the nearest small city. They'd gotten into an auto accident on a snowy highway. I'll never forgot that slow careful drive to the hospital on those roads in the falling snow myself. I shouldn't have gone alone but I had to go and I couldn't get ahold of anyone else. It turned out Mum and George had both been dead on arrival, and no one had wanted to say that over the telephone."

Hailey tried to stop herself from crying, determined that one day she should be able to think about all that without any more grief over it all. Try as she might though she just couldn't stop her tears from starting to fall for another of countless times in the past few years. The Doctor wrapped his arms around her and for a moment she just sat where she was crying into the sleeve of his jacket. Eventually she looked up, with her face red and started speaking again.

"Mum was pregnant though so of course the baby had to be delivered as soon as she was pronounced dead. She was far enough along that there was some real hope he would survive. It turned out she'd been carrying twins and that had never been discovered. Not long after I got into the hospital I was taken to see the little girl no one had known a thing about. She was so tiny and in such poor health that she couldn't even be held, but she was alive. The boy was dead when he was born, but I asked to see him too for a moment. He was even smaller than our sister, but he looked just like our mother. I knew someone would have to raise the little girl, and I decided I would start the process of applying for custody of her. Three days after she was born though, she died too. She was just too sick and too small to ever really have stood much of a chance."

"Neither one had a name, and I decided I just couldn't hand them over for burial without names. It just didn't seem fair to them, or to Mum and George. So when I had to file their papers, I named them myself. I called them Cathaleen and Jacob. I've so often thought to myself that the twins wanted to stay together and that's why Cathy died. I know it sounds crazy, but perhaps they knew they needed each other and they both needed our mother."

For many long moments the two of them just sat silently in the TARDIS console room, Hailey shaken up from the grief and misplaced guilt that still haunted her even then when she thought about her family too much, and the Doctor completely shaken up by the knowledge of what had happened.

"I just packed up and left not long after my family was buried," Hailey said after more silence and tears from both of them. She'd stopped crying then, and spoke and a clear but still slightly voice. "A lawyer and then the town hall phoned me within a week and a half. I couldn't stay in the house. The bank was taking it for resale because George had not finished paying it off and I didn't qualify for the mortgage on it. It's not like I cared much and I told them so, but still it seemed like that banker who started coming to the door after i'd talked the the town hall wanted to intimate and scare me away from the village. I started to feel unwelcome. Like people just didn't know how to react to the strange freakishly intelligent artist girl whose entire family was dead. I was fired from the grocery store just for taking time off to spend the days in the hospital with my baby sister before she died. It wasn't hard to tell I was no longer welcomed in the village. I took as much as I wanted to keep from the house, and decided to go off and find my place in the universe."

"Hailey, I'm very sorry to hear all that's happened. You seem okay though, so that's good news at least."

"Yeah. I'm okay now," Hailey said. "It's been over two years though since they all passed away. At first I was just so sad all the time. I felt horrible for being so mad at my mother for wanting a baby at first. For the first few months I just cried every night alone on my father's old ship. Then I got angry. Furious at myself and furious at any higher power that might exist. I didn't know what to do, or what to think of much of anything."

Hailey stopped speaking then abruptly, obviously wanting the whole subject to be dropped at that point. Wiping her eyes with the edge of the sleeve of her top and shaking her head a bit, she looked at the Doctor curiously.

"So what's your story?" she asked.

"How do you mean?"

"Well it's been a couple of years for you too. Things must have happened in that much time. You even ended up regenerating at some point during those years. How'd that happen?"

"I don't... I can't..." the Doctor muttered in a strange tone.

Hailey leaned forward in her seat with a look of both confusion and slight disappointment on her face. Her look turned then to concern as she spoke again. "Oh come on, surely nothing could have happened that was so terrible you can't even think or talk about it. You said you'd you'd tell me about that one day."

"It's just that it was such a confusion mess," the Doctor said. "I wouldn't even know where to start so that the whole story would make sense."

He stopped for a long moment and thought everything over. After a couple of minutes, he spoke once again, asking her a question, instead of directly answering hers. "Where you still on Earth the day a planet appeared in the sky?"

"Which time?" Hailey asked back. "A slightly similar thing happened twice. You mean the day everyone was suddenly seeing all these strange planets in the sky after the Earth was somehow moved?"

"No not... wait how did you know the Earth actually moved. I don't think that was ever officially stated in the news or anything. Government cover ups and things, of course."

"Well because it was kind of obvious," Hailey laughed. "I was telling people from the beginning that the Earth had moved and those planets hadn't just appeared in our solar system. They thought that was just silly. A whole planet couldn't just move. The stars were all different though and it was dark all the time. We were away from our sun. I still don't know why to this day no one just accepts that we moved."

"Earth was invaded too... again," the Doctor said. "Of course you know that. How did you do in the village?"

"Well the small towns and the villages were left alone mostly. I guess the cities were targeted first, in order to get the mass population under control. Everyone was still panicking though. No one could contact anyone in the cities and people were convinced it was the end of the world. I told the neighbors I knew the Doctor would save us, but no one listened. I tried to call you, but I couldn't get ahold of the TARDIS at all. I could only assume you already knew we were in trouble..."

Hailey stopped then and thought for a second, trying to piece together everything in her head. "If that's not the day you meant though then you must mean the second incident the next year. That huge orange and red planet that looked like it was about to knock Earth right out of orbit."

The Doctor nodded hesitantly, and Hailey went on recalling the day from her point of view. "The entire population was already in shock over something no one could quite remember then, but so many people were outside and everyone just sort of regained awareness. Suddenly everyone was looking up at this planet that had just sort of appeared out of nowhere and most people started screaming and crying and trying to find their families. I remember there were a few crazies outside too with their camera phones, trying to film it. That's humanity I suppose. Everyone panicking that the world is about to be destroyed and those crazy few decide to get it all on camera."

"Did you manage alright that day?" the Doctor asked, in honest concern.

"Yeah." Hailey nodded confidently. "Mostly I just sat on the roof of the house, because I could see everything from up there and no one could bother me. I stayed by myself most of the day, and I thought of you and could only hope nothing terrible had happened to you. I just knew that you must have come back to stop whatever was happening, and I remembered then everything you'd said about how you knew you would die soon after you sent me home that last time. I had my family then but of course you had no one. I wanted to find you and eventually I tired."

The Doctor looked at her seriously for a second before he started laughing a little. Quietly he muttered, "I tell my friends, to never wander away from where I left them and on no account to ever try to follow or find me. I tell them not to try to come and to save me from trouble because that's just too dangerous. Do any of you ever listen."

"I thought maybe I could help you," Hailey said, undeterred. "I figured you might need me. I never could lock onto your TARDIS though. Nothing was working properly. There was so much interference from various unknown energy sources."

"I'm glad of that,' the Doctor answered, speaking with complete seriousness. He looked at her with a mix of compassion, sternness and more than a hint of admiration. "Hailey, when I said back that I didn't want you involved in that situation, I meant it."

Hailey nodded her head, and gave a look of silent compliance, and an agreement to respect his wishes in sure important situations in the future. Her expression quickly turned then to one of curiosity as she began to question out loud A thought that had been in her mind for several years. "Doctor, I thought nothing of this at the time, but later I realized... that planet that suddenly appeared in the sky, I've seen that before. I've seen pictures just like it in my textbook. But it couldn't have been, could it..."

Still sitting her her chair, now looking up at him wide eyed with confusion and curiosity and wonder. "Was that really... our home?"

The Doctor slowly muttered confirmation, all the while unsure exactly what he might say next. He'd known full well she would have most likely guess correctly at the planet's identity years before. Still though, now that the subject was out and in the open, he had to admit he was unsure how he might expect she would react to the whole thing.

"So then that means the Time Lords came back, for a short while at least?" Hailey's words were partly a question but mostly just a statement of something to her her would already be obvious.

"They tried to, yeah," the Doctor said. He couldn't hide either his sadness or his anger over it but of course he tried anyway.

Hailey, reading his expression well, was confused. "But... isn't that a good thing?"

Standing up from her chair she flew instantly into a flurry of thoughts, all of which she voiced out loud in her excitement. "Well if they succeeded once, they can do it again. I have no idea how this would work but someone must have locked onto a something that was already outside the time lock... an object maybe, perhaps even a person. Of course the planet should never been so close to Earth, but that must have been an accident, because whoever or whatever, they were locking into was on Earth. All we should need to do then is give them something else to use to pull themselves back into this dimension again. This time we'll put it on a planet far away. One with no life on it. I think we can save them."

"Hailey!" the Doctor said, louder than he'd intended to, in an effort to interrupt her intent plotting. "Don't you think I've thought of such things so many times before. You're right that it would probably work. But Hailey, I can't bring the Time Lords back. They'd probably destroy the universe if we did that."

Hailey stopped instantly and for a moment she stood frozen in her tracks where she was standing in the middle of the room. "What?"

"You must remember that there was a reason they had to be stopped in the first place. I didn't only shut my entire race into the time lock to stop a war. I was trying to save all of reality." the Doctor stood up slowly and went to his companion. He pulled her into his arms and for a moment he hugged her, before he led her back to sit down again.

"There were times in the years before they came back, that I thought it might be okay if they did," he explained slowly. "I'd hoped everything had changed and those years of finding themselves stuck in there would have been enough to end their new train of selfish thought. But I saw that day that not only had it not stopped any of that, it might have even made it worse. As for Gallifrey rematerializing so close to the Earth, that was not accidental at all. It could have been placed anywhere. Just like you said, there are plenty of uninhabited worlds on which no one would have been killed if the planet was knocked out of orbit."

"Doctor," Hailey questioned quietly. "Is that why you refused to let me help you?"

The Doctor nodded slowly. "I had a good idea of who and what was returning soon. Of course you understand that the Time Lords become more and more corrupted near the end. Still though, you rely on that hope that they can all still be good people. I couldn't destroy your hope and your faith in that. If you had been found you'd have probably been killed. How could I risk you being destroyed by anything, let alone our own people."

"I suppose one of the Time Lords tired to kill you then," Hailey guessed. "It's so hard to really wrap my head around that still, but I guess I could imagine how that might happen."

"Oh a few of them wanted to, yes. But they failed entirely. Strange, I thought for sure that's how it would end. I was ready to just give up and accept defeat."

"So what went wrong after all?"

"Ever notice how sometimes life has ways of just knocking us right off our feet just as we think we've done something amazing," the Doctor said. He stopped for a moment to think and then went on. Sort of like, oh I don't know... running a ten kilometer race, finding yourself actually coming in first with several meters between you and the next runner and suddenly slipping on a banana peel fifteen paces from the finish line?"

For several seconds Hailey laughed out loud at his example. Composing herself she looked at him, with at least a partly serious expression on her face. I honestly can't say I've ever had that happen. I can imagine the basic idea though."

"Well basically," the Doctor said slowly picture a situation a bit like that. Only there was no running involved, had nothing to do with bananas ,and was far more serious than just falling down. Hmmm... okay actually I suppose that example was way off then wasn't it..."

Hailey found herself laughing again, much harder than before, without any real idea of exactly what it was the found that funny. For a couple of minutes though she sat in her seat with her hands over her stomach and trying hard to stop her laughter.

"I'm sorry," she said, looking up again. "I know none of this is a laughing matter. I just forgot for a second we were discussing such serious topics."

"That's okay," the Doctor said, laughing as well. "Can't just stay serious for too long at once. Or at least I hope not."

"Seriously Doctor," Hailey said next, still trying to stop laughing. "That analogy is just crazy. Who in heaven's name would drop a banana peel onto a running track?"

"Someone who wanted the lead runner to lose the race?"

"Well yeah... I suppose. But that would just be mean."

"True, but if someone had money bet on the race..."

"Who gambles on track and field events?" Hailey shook her head.

The Doctor shrugged. "Isn't that a common human pass time? Betting on the races?"

Hailey got up from her seat and wandered across the control room. She continued to shake her head in disbelief for another moment, completely unsure whether he was trying to be funny at that point or not.

He jumped to his own feet seconds after her and for a second or two he leaned against the wall with his arms folded over his chest. It was as impossible to tell if he was truly annoyed, or only pretending to be.

"What?" he finally questioned innocently enough.

"When people say they like to bet on the races, they tend to mean dogs or horses," Hailey said. She had stopped laughing by that time, but once again she shook her head slightly.

"Human beings," the Doctor muttered. "They are just never specific enough about those sorts of things."

"It's great to be able to talk seriously sometimes, but I certainly needed to have a good laugh too," Hailey said.

The Doctor nodded his agreement. He sat back down again.

"I'm getting bored though," he mumbled in a way that was almost childlike.

"Me too," Hailey said. Still on her feet, and almost childlike herself, she gently pulled him up by the hand. "Let's go find something interesting."


	4. Chapter 4

** A/N; Thanks so far for the reviews and positive comments. It gives me hope that this is worth continuing on with. As promised, a bit more excitement in this chapter. Also a reappearance by an original character from part one. (Ten points if you can spot him.) **

** animemonkey13 - I don't think this is going to turn into a romance story really, no. I was thinking about it, but season six made me think not. Actually I never thought of whether or not Amy Rory and River might show up in here or not. Maybe, maybe not... Hmmm... *considers* **

The first thing Hailey noticed when she stepped out the door of the TARDIS was the rain. Huge cold droplets of water fell from the sky in a steady relentless downpour. Rain was the last thing she'd expected, and she pulled the hood of her baggy sweater up over her head in an attempt to keep herself at least a little bit dryer. Through the torrent of rain and the thick fog that came along with it, she slowly started to make out the shapes and rough outlines of not too distant buildings she thought she could recognize.

"Well, look at that," the Doctor exclaimed, the moment he stepped out after her. "Bit of a rainstorm here."

Hailey looked around again in confusion. A big red bus rattled by, and for a second she found herself disoriented. "Doctor, I don't think we're on Zortec Magana Three. Aren't we supposed to be on a planet of ice, not a place full of pouring rain?"

"No," the Doctor muttered both to himself and his companion. He reached back around the still open door and retrieved a bright yellow umbrella that he quickly held up over their heads. "No I don't think we're anywhere near where we were supposed to be at all."

"This is London," Hailey said as soon as she'd realized exactly where it was they'd found themselves. "I used to ride right past here every evening on the bus, when I worked in that pub years ago."

She pointed down the street to the west, after taking a moment to get her bearings through the fog and her own bewilderment. "The Pint and Barrel pub is about six more blocks that way. About a block away from here was my bus stop. How'd we end up here. Your navigation is never this badly off. Besides the monitor told us we were on Zortec Magana."

The Doctor walked quickly out into the street and made his way across it with Hailey following him closely. The two of them took cover from the rain inside the first building they could get to on the other side of the road. It turned out to be a somewhat busy electronics shop.

"This just isn't making sense yet," he muttered as he looked all around at the crowd of shoppers and rows of shelves. "Everything is so Earth-like, but the monitor clearly said we are not on Earth at all."

"So you're saying this isn't real?" Hailey questioned.

"I don't know for sure yet. It seems to me though that this may well be some kind of illusion. The one thing I really don't see though is why. What's it all for?"

"It looks perfectly real to me. Why not just consider the obvious?"

"What's that?"

"Well that there's a problem with the monitor again," Hailey said rolling her eyes.

Seeming to ignore her completely, the Doctor took his sonic screwdriver from his jacket pocket, and began to pace around the shop quickly, stopping to turn now and then and all the while waving the device through the air in every possible direction.

"Odd," he said to himself, but still out loud. He continued to scan the room, while trying to notice anything and everything. "No frequencies present that would be commonly connected to any kind of teleport. It looks like the early twenty-first century in here and the timing is showing as exactly that time period. I'm picking up life forms but nothing that's triggering any warnings."

"Of course you're picking up life forms Doctor," Hailey said anxiously. "This shop is full of customers."

"We yes, but those are probably all illusions," the Doctor answered. He so certain, so determined and entirely convinced that he was right. Without paying attention and still muttering to himself about the confusion of the situation, he turned fast and banged right into a lady in business attire, balancing an armload of merchandise. He stepped back in surprise, nearly knocking over a display of small remote controlled cars, and without missing another step, he scanned the lady, with a puzzled expression on his face. The business woman backed up a few steps, staring at him with a look of annoyance.

"Excuse me," she snapped, coldly. "Do you mind."

"Are you sure you're human. A real human I mean. Not some kind of..."

"Get out of here, you crazy weirdo."

"Sorry, sorry," the Doctor muttered in response.

"Good news, though," he called after the lady, who was retreating quickly toward the sales counter with her armload of goods, all the while mumbling rude comments about the sort of people she tended to have a way of running into. "According to my scans you are completely a very real human being!"

"Doctor!" Hailey whispered sharply, stepping over quickly to take hold of his jacket sleeve. "Put that away. You're going to make someone angry."

He walked back toward the door and out once again into the rain with Hailey close behind him. "Well you were right. This is definitely Earth. The real Earth. My plotting went seriously wrong. That's not so odd, but the monitor failed too, at exactly the same time."

The pair made their way quickly into a cafe down the block and across the street, managing to get in the door just as the rain began to fall harder. Sitting at a table in the far back corner of the place, and watching through the window as a steady flow of afternoon traffic splashed through the wet street, they continued conversing with each other in mild confusion.

"It's not so strange that we ended up here is it?" Hailey asked.

"I don't know yet. Likely not too strange."

"It feels like so long since I've been back on Earth. I suppose I did sort of miss it here."

"Of course you would," the Doctor said. "Earth is your home planet. It makes sense to miss your home."

"True," Hailey replied. "I don't feel like I really belong here though anymore. I mean, I like Earth and all. I grew up and went to school here. But something about trying to live among the human race while learning to understand more and more of the knowledge of things they will never comprehend gets a bit strange. I never really knew this until I left with you years ago, but the human race just thinks differently."

The waitress, who was visibly pregnant but looked genuinely happy, made her way over quickly to fill their coffee cups. The small cafe was quiet, and she was happy to stop for a moment to chat with them. She only laughed a little and then nodded in understanding of 'those kind of days' when the Doctor asked her for the date and year.

"May second, 2016," she said smiling. "Of course I'm horrid with the date myself. I only know today's because today I'm exactly three months away from baby's due date."

"First child?" Hailey asked, making conversation.

The waitress only laughed a little. "Heavens no. The forth now. My husband and I have three little boys at home already. This one came as somewhat of a surprise, just when we thought our family was complete. This one's a girl. I was so happy when I found that out. Of course I love my boys, but a daughter will be amazing too."

"Congratulations to you." Hailey said.

"Oh thank you," the Waitress answered. She was clearly about to say something more, but she turned around instead, distracted by someone moving behind her quickly. Hailey saw it too and she tracked the motion. It would easily seem that a customer had simply walked in and was making his way over to an empty table to wait for the sociable server to bring him a menu and a cup of coffee. An obvious and logical assumption, expect for the fact that Hailey had a clear view of both the front door and the hallway leading to the restrooms. The cafe was small and she could see around it well enough to know that given the direction the individual had walked he'd have either gone waving his way around a group of tables with no logic at all, or literally come through a wall, to end up coming from the direction he came from. And even if he had taken the illogical route around a lot of table and chairs, where exactly would he have come from. She looked around again to make sense of it all. A small broom closet? What possible sense did that make? It was the strange newcomer's appearance though that made her freeze for a moment in her seat, and stare motionless at him and the room around him.

The man, who had somehow come inside in an unusual way, wore a simple pair of light green loosely fitted coveralls, which given the general usage of coveralls were surprising clean. He wasn't a tall man, but nor was he short. His hair was short and very blond and slightly unkempt. On his wrist he wore a strange and clearly high-tech device, that she recognized so well it surprised her. She knew she'd seen men that looked exactly like this one before. For a second she wondered if one one she was looking at now was one she'd previously met or not.

"Doctor," she whispered as she reached across the table to get her friend's attention by pulling lightly on the edge of his jacket sleeve. "I've seen someone like him before. Years ago on a train."

The Doctor looked all around the best he could while still sitting down, deciding not to get up and draw too much attention to himself. Unable to spot anything he might have been looking for, he simply muttered, "what's he actually doing?"

Hailey looked around again. "He's just sort of pacing about. It looks like he's lost."

"Exactly. But since when did a galactic patrol agent from Reshamor seven just get himself lost in an Earth cafe?" The two of them, as well as the now clearly puzzled waitress, now standing across the room, watched as the man in the coveralls paced once again across the room, and as though unaware there was anyone around at all, dropped to his knees and quickly made his way under one of the tables, where he looked at at the bottom of it, clearly curious about something or other.

"So that's what those guys on the train were then," Hailey said quietly. "Galactic patrol agents? I'd imagine they aren't really the bad guys at all then. I was never sure who's side they were on."

"They aren't bad, no. Not exactly good though either. I suppose they think they are doing what's right, but really they tend to be more of of an interplanetary nuisance than anything else."

The Doctor quickly and confidently got up from his chair and walked forward a few stops.

"You're not really going to bother talking to that patrol agent are you?" Hailey questioned.

"Yeah. Why not. It's not as though he's known to be dangerous in most cases. You've met them before. You know they probably won't hurt anyone, they are just hard to get straight answers from."

With that he walked off into the middle of the cafe, right behind the agent, who was for some reason or other still investigating the underside of the tabletop. The waitress was standing near the front counter now, curious but obviously feeling slightly threatened by the man on the floor. Aside from the four people out front and likely a couple of unseen kitchen staff in the back somewhere, the place was empty. The waitress made a quick move as if to run for the kitchen herself, but stopped once she realized the distance she was from it. She stepped toward the door but silently shook her head, clearly having decided she couldn't abandon the restaurant entirely.

"Hey," the Doctor said to the man under the table. "You alright under there?"

The galactic patrol agent crawled quickly out from under the table. He jumped to his feet and for a moment he just stared at the doctor, as though making a very bad attempt to intimidate him. Finally the agent simply questioned in obvious frustration, "Who are you?"

"I'm the Doctor."

At that the agent took a small slow step backward, and tipped his head a little to the left in slight bewilderment. After a silent second, he simply stated calmly, "your reputation preceeds you, Doctor. You are well known as a great source of disruption to my people and our agents."

"Your agents nearly took down a level three primitive society based only on a rumor that they were protecting your enemies. This narrow minded and half blind chasing through the galaxy after trouble has to stop. And that wasn't the first time your people were caught bullying other races either."

"So you are here in defense of the Tellilons then?" the agent questioned, still calmly. It was, as was becoming clear, unusual for Reshamor seven's patrol agents to get even a bit angry over anything.

"You would have killed hundreds of them, including several infants, last year if I hadn't stopped you. What did those little spear carrying furballs ever do to you or anyone else?"

"You said yourself, Doctor, that we would not likely kill anyone deliberating when explaining it to your friend moments ago. We would never have killed those annoying primitives either."

"Not directly no. Of course not. That's not your directive and thank goodness for that, too. However your actions would have resulted in their deaths, and you did nothing to prevent that from occurring."

"They are only animals." The agent sounded bored by that time.

"No more than the humans of this planet we are on now are animals. No more than any intelligent race is just an animal," the Doctor protested. He was growing frustrated with the whole matter. "Anyway, that's got nothing to do with the reason I'm talking to you!"

"So what do you want?"

"I want to know why you're here. Why come to Earth at all? And why wander into a little cafe? Surely there can"t be anything here for you, and your people are hardly reputed to be good tourists."

"I could ask you the same thing. Surely Time Lords are not in the habit of wandering about the galaxy without reason either."

"No, but we can. We can go anywhere we want."

"I feel I am entitled to that same right." The agent still sounded bath calm and bored all at the same time. "Tell me then Doctor, you've come for a reason and surely it wasn't just to track one single galactic patrol agent. Did you get as lost as I did?"

"I can't ask you to get off this planet," the Doctor said. "You're right. You have the same rights as anyone to travel as you please. But please don't cause any trouble while you.."

"Wait," said Hailey, jumping up her her seat at the table and walking forward a couple of meters to address the agent herself. The Doctor was about to protest her interruption but she held up a hand to silently convince him to give her a chance to talk. "Did you just say you got lost?"

"Yes," was all the agent said. Typical of his people, he did not volunteer any information he had not been directly asked for.

"So, how'd you get here?"

"I remember running onto the teleport platform at space station seventeen. The controller had, at my request, set the course for my home world, but when I stepped back off the platform once again, I wasn't home at all. I found myself in the middle of this structure. I've established that it's some kind of place people go to eat, and I think this planet must be Earth, but how I got here I can't say. The teleport was thrown off somehow."

~DW~DW~DW~DW~DW~

On her first proper night back on board the Doctor's TARDIS, Hailey had found her old bedroom exactly the same as she had left it years before. She'd been working a bit whenever she had a free moment, to rearrange the room a little. Once she and the Doctor had gotten back to the ship after their encounter with the patrol agent in the cafe, she made her way into her room again and grateful for some needed time on her own, she decided to move the little wooden desk to the opposite wall. Having done that, she discovered that the bed looked a little cramped, now sharing a wall with both the desk and the door. Carefully, she pushed the bed around until it sat next to another wall itself. She looked at the bed in it's new position, decided she liked it there much better, but realized then that the bedclothes looked out of place and somehow all wrong.

She made her way with great purpose to the linen closet, down the hall near her room, and choose a much different bedding set from in there. She hurried back into her room, and even though the linens on her bed were freshly laundered, she stripped the bed completely and put on first an alternate set of sheets and pillow cases, and then a dark blue and white quilt. Next she opened the small closet and began to sort through the hangers full of clothing; most of which no longer fit her properly. She decided that she didn't care for much of it anymore in any case. Making up her mind to move some of it to the ship's wardrobe room downstairs, she removed the first few hangers from the closet just as a knock on the door startled her from her task.

"Come in," she called, without bothering to see first who was at the door. There were only two of them on board and she was quite sure the ship was in the middle of space.

The Doctor walked into the room quickly and sat down in the chair in front of the desk, looking around the room for a moment. After a minute or so, he simply said, "Doing a little redecorating are you?"

"Sort of yeah," Hailey answered. She shoved the nightstand across the room, so that it was next to the bed once again. Then she sat down on the bed and looked around, deciding what to do next. "I'm not sure this room really suits me anymore for whatever reason. And you know how it is, move one thing and then you've just got to keep moving everything around."

"If you want, we can change the room entirely," the Doctor said. "Just a matter of using the main computer to reprogram this room."

"You wouldn't mind changing part of your ship around though?"

"Of course not."

"Thanks!"

Hailey got to her feet again and went back to the closet. She started to pull more of the clothing, hangers and all carefully down from the rail. Some of the pieces, she immediately set down onto the bed, which was now within arm's reach behind her. Others, she held up and looked over for a second of two, debating whether it would still fit her and if she could still wear it properly. She shifted some things over to the other side of the rail, deciding they were certainly worth holding onto. All the while she payed attention, waiting for her friend to say something more.

He said nothing at all right away, but instead just sat at the desk watching her and shaking his head slightly in puzzled amusement. Hailey knew enough about people in general, and certainly enough about him, to know that he must have been simply thinking she was insane to be confused and concerned over clothing, and that matching up the colors was a silly and pointless activity. That didn't stop her though from holding up her bright yellow lose fitting knitted sweater and turning around to face him with it in both hands.

"What do you think?" she asked half helplessly. "Does this one still work?"

"How in the name of whatever divine power is out there, should I know?" he answered back, laughing and shaking his head.

Hailey turned back to the closet and looked at the mirror mounted on the back of it's door. "Actually, I'm not so sure about this one anymore. I'm surprised at how many things don't look right now. It's the hair that's complicating things. Red hair is so hard to work with."

"Not such a bad hair color at all," the Doctor said, clearly sympathizing with her frustration over a greatly altered appearance in recent days, even though he coudln't relate to the fashion aspect of it all. "I've known a few amazing red haired ladies in my life."

He rambled on a bit about previous companions, talking in somewhat great length about the last companion to travel with him. A girl called Amy. Hailey stood listening, somewhat sadly, when she realized how much he had cared about that one. Of course, she reminded herself, he cared about all of them, and she knew there had been so many. He briefly mentioned a lady called Donna from a bit further back in his life. He said little about her, other than that she was never afraid to give a verbal slap-down to anyone that got in her way. She recognized that name though. She'd heard it once before, years ago, during a brief reunion with the Doctor, near the end of his time in his previous body. Her circumstances, she recalled, had been tragic. He still thought somehow something he could never quite explain, was his fault. Unsure what to say, or if she should say anything at all, Hailey set the hanger down on the bed and did nothing more at all.

"Before anyone else though, there was my mother," the Doctor said, speaking again unexpectedly after a couple of long and silent minutes. "I knew her in two of her regenerations, and in the earlier one, the one I recall as early childhood memories, she had hair nearly the same color as yours."

Hailey hoped so much that he would go on talking about years so long ago, but he said nothing more than that simple passing comment. She was about to ask him to tell her more, but already he was on his feet himself and had a paper print-out she knew was from the ship's computer, from his jacket pocket.

"I was just busy reviewing some information stored in your ship's computer," He explained. "Easily done, since yours is stored on board this one again. Their computers link up, like using a secondary hard drive or something like that. Anyway, it seems it might have run into a meteor storm before it crashed. That could well explain things."

"It explains why it may have crashed yes, but it hardly explains why I flew into such a thing in the first place."

"You're generally good at flying. I think you're right. That should never have happened. Okay, from your perspective, what happened before you crashed?"

"The strangest thing I noticed is that the TARDIS was not where it was supposed to be. It had moved from where I'd left it drifting. Before I could work anything out really, it got hit several times. That was probably enough to make it crash, but I can't tell you why the shields were down in the first place. If it had been shielded, such a thing shouldn't have done it much harm. I can't remember seeing much of anything strange on the monitor either."

"You were able to move to a new part of space though after you found your ship in distress. Good thinking there."

"Doctor, I didn't move the ship. I didn't have enough time to do that. The last thing I remember is trying to catch myself before I fell over the railing."

"Are you sure?" the Doctor questioned. Though such a thing was certainly uncommon for him, he looked genuinely confused and bothered by circumstances he could not understand. "Hailey think very carefully. This is important. If you really didn't move the ship, then you ran into a meteor storm in a place where such a thing can't nornally happen."

"I didn't move the ship," Hailey said slowly and thoughtfully, trying to think through the haze of fuzzy memories. "I flew right into it somehow. Still can't figure that one out. Then the ship landed hard on the planet right below."

"Something strange sure went on there," the Doctor muttered, to himself but still out loud.

"A few strange things have happened in the last few days," Hailey said, stopping to think and speaking slowly. Feeling a sudden need to multi-task, doing something else while conversing, she went to the nightstand intending to sort through the random contents of it's little drawer. "Granted, strange things tend to happen to either of us on a regular basis but it's been above and beyond..."

Her statement was cut off right there, as she touched the small handle on the front of the little table. An electric shock ran through her hand and up her arm. The low amount of voltage was not too strong or dangerous in itself, but still a bit painful and definitely startling. She pulled her hand back instantly with a cry or horrified disbelief. Jumping to her feet fast, she backed away a bit, shaking a little from the sudden fright.

"What's wrong? You okay?" the Doctor questioned urgently. He jumped up from his seat at the desk and hurried over to her.

"Uhh... yeah. I'm fine I think. I... I just got a bit of a shock..."

"A shock? You mean like an electrical shock?"

"Yeah... at least I'm pretty sure that's what..."

"It's a metal handle on a wooden table,' the Doctor exclaimed in stunned confusion. "How on Earth do you get a shock from something like that. The wood should have insulted any electrical current that might have tired to come though it. And where would the electricity have come from in the first place?"

Before he had finished his baffled and bewildered wonderings out loud, he had taken his sonic screwdriver from his pocket and had scanned first the nightstand, then Hailey and finally the room itself quickly. He shook his head in confusion and with a look of sudden realization appearing on his face, he quickly scanned over the room once more.

Speaking fast, he explained what he could. "Everything contains energy of some kind or other. But of course you already know that. Basic grade school science there. Anyway when things become too changed somehow or other we get electrical activity. A metal object of course conducts this. That's why you got a shock off it. Everything able to conduct energy well, become so positively charged that you could have just as easily gotten a shock like that from anything metal in here. I've neutralized it I believe. We're perfectly safe now. But the question is what caused the positive charge?"

"I told you things have been strange these last few days," Hailey said. She mumbled her intentions to go to the kitchen to make tea. The Doctor, nodding his agreement, walked out of the room with her.

"There was the meteor storm close to a planet where there was never supposed to be such a thing," Hailey said, beginning to list events of the the past days, as she sipped a cup of tea at the small table in the ship's kitchen. That's why my ship flew into it. It was something was not supposed to be there. Then there's the fact that my ship moved on it's own with no logical reason. That's how it ended up there to begin with. I'd started out in a very different location. The shields went offline at the same time, again with no reasoning behind that either This afternoon that patrol agent admitted he was lost and didn't know how he got into that cafe. His teleport went haywire I guess. And this after we ended up in the wrong place ourselves, again without reason. Even the TARDIS didn't know where it was. Now there's obviously something going on tonight with the electrical energy around here."

"So what do you think of all this?" the Doctor asked, honestly wanting to know what she did indeed think. He held his teacup in his hand but looked as though he'd simply forgotten to drink from it, before setting it back down. "Is it really more than just one heck of a series of coincidences?"

Instead of giving a direct answer right away, Hailey instead added one more incident to her list. "Not long before I crash landed, I'd been exploring a bit on the planet Matraxian Jarvo. I've been there before several times. I like that place and it's always been so nice and peaceful. That day though for no clear reason at all I was attacked by a few of the Tessilons."

"Tessilons attacked you?" the Doctor said in amazement. "But they're not known to ever really attack anyone. They're a bit unpredictable, yeah. They are a very new and still primitive race after all. Normally they're so friendly though unless they're maybe cornered and hurt or something. What did you do right before they went after you?"

"Just walking slowly through the woods. I saw a couple of them in the distance and I tried to take a picture of them. But I've photographed them before, from much closer. Normally they were just curious about the camera. I let one play with it before, but I had to take it from him when he tried to step on it. They're normally just playful and silly and curious about technology."

"They would be, yes. To have them suddenly attack for no real reason is just not normal behavior."

"Something upset them." Hailey mused. "They were obviously on edge about something or other, though my scanner didn't detect a thing, and it should have I think. And yes Doctor, in answer to your question, I do think all this is more than just coincidence."

The Doctor took a drink from his teacup at last,put the cup down againa nd sat for a few long seconds thinking. Finally he looked his companion right in the eyes and and said seriously, "so do I. But the question is, exactly what's going on?"


	5. Chapter 5

Hailey and the Doctor were in the console room, working through some simply routine maintanence to the ship's main computer systems. The Doctor stood off to the side in a small side room resembling a cramped closet, and looked over the computer itself, with it's many flashes and blinking lights, and the circuit breakers next to it, trying to work out what was what. That was the easy part. Remembering each function in the right order was always harder.

Hailey was sitting down near the console, looking at the monitor and typing commands once in a while and in specific order on a keyboard she held on her lap. She waited for her friend to call out the next commend to her as he looked everything over and worked their way through from top to bottom and then back to the top of the next row. She was still quite unconfidant at using a Gallifreyan keyboard, but so far she was doing better with it than she'd expected to do.

"Circuit ninety eight," the Doctor called. "Top floor, west side corner."

Hailey quickly typed the command into the system, and as she had done for every other one so far, entered the instruction to 'scan.' A green light came up on the monitor.

"Okay, check," she called.

"Ninty nine," the Doctor called next. Hailey repeated the process again, looked back to the monitor once again and saw the light turn blue.

"Blue light," she called. "So, unused connection."

"Right. Thought so on that one. "Okay, circuit one hundred then. No idea what that one does either."

"One hundred? Okay. Wait, how do I type one hundred in the Gallifreyan number system?"

"Just use the characters for one and two zeros, just like in Earth's number system. That's not exactly correct, but the TARDIS is smart. She can read that way fine."

"Okay got it. And green light again, so check. Why am I doing all this in Gallifreyan common anyway? I think surely I'd be faster in English."

"You could use the practice," the Doctor said quickly, from behind the same door, and while still looking over the computer equipment intently. "We haven't studied much of anything since you've been back. Besides, I seem to have misplaced the English language keyboard for the mainframe computer, and why be bothered to look for it today."

Hailey was about to comment back, intending to agree with him, when the ringing of a telephone caught her entirely off guard. For a second or two she only looked around the room helplessly and baffled by the sound. Though she'd heard that before, still the last thing had ever got used to hearing or expecting to hear on board, was a ringing telephone. She knew the Doctor had a phone of course. it had rung a time or two during her travels with him years before. She had even heard the one on her own ship ring once. Still though it struck her as odd and out of place every time. The phone rang again, reminding her that action of some sort was required.

"I should... grab that?" she offered with some hesitation.

"Hailey," the Doctor called, obviously having heard only the ringing and not her question, "Answer the phone."

"Right. Got it." Hailey set the keyboard down and quickly jumped to her feet. She looked around the room until she found the phone, far back on the console behind the navigation set-up. It rang a third time before she picked it up.

"Umm... Hello?" She shook her head, realizing that in her confusion, and with computer checks on her mind she'd nearly answered in spoken Gallifreyan instead of English by mistake.

She expected someone important and likely of great power and authority, on the line. She imagined that some Earth politician from days long passed, or some great and mighty alien dignitary was anxiously seeking out the Doctor's help. The voice on the other end of the line, or rather the words that voice spoke, both surprised and shocked her into nearly dropping the phone.

"Hey. Uhhh... how's it going tonight?" The caller sounded clearly unsure and somewhat confused himself, but it was also obvious from the sound of his voice that he was quite drunk. Uncertain though he was of who he was speaking with, he went right on anyway. "Can I please get one extra large meat lovers pizza. Hey, it's Wednesday right? Two for one night. Let's make it two meat lovers then."

"Wha..." was all Hailey could manage to say, before the intoxicated caller continued on.

"Oh and that'll be delivery too." He said nothing for a second, but it quickly become obvious there was someone else in the house with him. Clearly not realizing in his drunken state that he still held the phone against his head, he yelled right into the receiver, while obviously meaning to shout across a room, "Yo, man! What's the address here?"

Hailey shook her head in disbelief and held the phone away from her ear. Finally she managed to interrupt the caller before he started up his senseless nonsense and shouting again. "Sorry. This isn't a pizza parlor. You've dialed the... the wrong number."

She caught herself before she ended up trying to explain to some drunk back on Earth, that somehow or other he had accidently called the time vortex. She promptly hung up the telephone, and for a second she just stood staring at it as though as though she didn't understand the nature of the simple device.

"What was that all about?" the Doctor questioned. He went to stand with his companion near the controls.

"Wrong number. Some guy who'd had too much to drink trying to phone for take out."

"What? But it should be next to impossible to phone the TARDIS by accident. He'd have to dial the time vortex, and you'd have to know exactly what you're doing to do that. It's not like just ringing your local pastry shop to ask if they are open late Fridays. You can't just phone the TARDIS by mistake!"

"I know, but something certainly happened."

It was right at that second that music began to play from somewhere unseen. Hailey searched the console room in startled puzzlement, listening carefully for the source of the sound. Eventually she made her way to a small cabinet near the stairs and pulled it open to find a small radio among the various odds and ends on the shelves. Apparently it has switched on of it's own accord. Coldplay's Viva la Vida was currently playing over some clearly picking up radio station. She picked up the radio and set it down on the railing. It still played perfectly well.

"Doctor," she said, seeing him looking at the radio with as puzzled and surprised of a look as she must have had on her own face. "What can cause electronics to turn themselves on like that?"

"Oh, several things can do that. Nothing I can see though that's obvious in this case."

"So, this and the wrong number just to be added to the list of strange little events lately then?"

The Doctor was about to reply, but before he spoke he held his hand up to motion for his companion to be quiet for a moment. He stepped closer to the radio, just as the music faded off into static. Through the buzzing and hissing of the speakers came a voice. It sounded male, and was speaking in a language that sounded completely and entirely alien.

The TARDIS translation device, more used to translating the spoken words or people that were nearby, than it was for a radio, took a moment to catch up. Within brief seconds though, Hailey was able to understand the voice over small speakers in clear English.

"...Agent 561... Trouble with the teleport again... have reached Matraxian Jarvo... I will get on with..."

The radio went back onto it's proper setting and music played again. This time it was some song Hailey didn't recognize. She and the Doctor looked quizzically at each other for a moment, neither one of them sure what to make of the very likely accidently received transmission over the airwaves.

It was less than a second before the Doctor flew into sudden and prompt action. He made the few steps toward the controls with great speed, and right away he began pushing buttons, pulling switches and entering coordinates. With it's familiar whining whirring sound and a slight vibration, the time ship took off into the vortex. Hailey hurried over to the console herself waited to be asked to help him fly the ship.

"Where are we going?" she questioned, standing still and waiting to be told to do something. "Well, where and when I should say."

"To Matraxian Jarvo," the Doctor replied. "That was a galactic patrol agent we heard over the radio. If he says that's where he is, then we're going too. Hailey, would you set the gravity compensators please?"

Hailey pressed a few buttons and then found herself holding on to the front of the console without even thinking consciously about it. "One of those same agents we saw in that cafe? Didn't you already catch them on Matraxian Jarvo before you found me. I thought you put a stop to any trouble that might have been going on there."

"I did. Or I thought I did. Now it seems they are back there though and knowing them as I do, I'm worried they'll try to start a war with the Tessilons."

"A war with the Tessilons," Hailey cried in concern. "That wouldn't be anything near a fair fight. It would be a massacre!"

"No use getting too far ahead of ourselves yet," the Doctor assured her, as the ship rematerialized on the ground.

The grassy land of Matraxian Jarvo welcomed them as the two travelers stepped slowly out of the TARDIS. They'd landed near a small but quickly flowing stream, in what was clearly a quiet meadow. Here and there were large trees with smooth sturdy trunks, and big somewhat drooping leaves. The sky was it's usual greenish color tinted with a bit of dark blue, and it looked perfectly calm and peaceful. The Doctor took a couple of steps forward away from the door, and stopped abruptly. Hailey, walking right behind him, nearly banged into him as he stopped. She stepped around to stand beside him, and both of them laughed out loud at what they had found.

A small group of tiny Tessilon children, likely averaging around seven years old, but each only about the size of a human two year old, had surrounded the front of the time ship, looking up at it in curious wonder. A small child, whom they thought was most likely a girl, reached up to tug at the bottom of the Doctor's jacket, simply trying to figure out exactly what he was. She could barely reach high enough. Her little pink fingers barely brushed the fabric.

Adult Tessilons were so often reputed as the closet thing to fearless that could exist within a primitive society. It was typical for them to wait until something gave them a fair reason to fear it, before they ran from it or reacted negatively to it. They were driven mostly by curiosity and a need to understand anything and everything in their environment. The children were far worse for that sort of thing. A young one was scared of so little that they would of course wander up to anything without a thought. The species existed and evolved on a world that would for all intents and purposes be considered a safe world until the patrol agents found it. The race therefore still considered itself free to explore freely and without much concern. The young were permitted to spend hours away from their parents. It stood to reason that the whole little group of them that gathered now was entirely un-supervised.

Quickly enough the children lost interest in the travelers and their ship, and began to disperse out into the meadow. Many of them picked up fallen branches nearly as long as the children were tall, and they all began to run forward in a group. They pretended to be a hunting party, out chasing down a wild beast that had come close to their camp.

"It doesn't look like trouble here at all," Hailey observed. She looked around the clearing, which was silent except for the shouts of excitement from the children.

"That agent isn't here yet," the Doctor explained. "We've gone back in time about twenty-five minutes in order to get here first.

"Oh. We should we hide the TARDIS somewhere? What if he gets here and finds it?"

"Actually I'm hoping he does. Just the idea that we've gotten here first might be enough to send him off on his way again."

"This is a whole planet though. And entire world. What makes you think he'll land near here, or even on this continent?"

"He'll land around here."

"How can you be so sure of that?"

"I just know. I know their equipment."

High pitched shrieks and screams rose up from the other side of the large open meadow. Each of the two adventurers, instantly remembered the children that were playing over there and without a word to one another, they both ran to their rescue without a second thought. They made their way quickly into the grove of trees the children had recently hurried into while playing, and found a member of the galactic patrol, standing in his green coveralls among the green landscape.

With one hand he held a Tessilon child upside down by her feet, about a meter off the ground. The child he held, the same tiny girl that had been so innocently pulling at the hem of the Doctor's jacker not long ago, was boldly attempted to hit the agent in the knees with the stick she still held tightly with both hands. A few other furry pink children stood close by snarling at the invader with narrowed eyes. It was the more timid few of them that were screaming and shrieking. One boy cried helplessly near the edge of the tree line. Without thinking about it, Hailey ran immediately to pick up the crying Tessilon boy. If there was any worry of further scaring or even angering anyone, it wasn't obvious at all then. The boy only shook in fright, and pointed a fat little finger toward his trapped friend.

"Put that child down," the Doctor demanded sharply, making his way quickly over to where the agent stood. "Why are you manhandling a small child in the first place?"

"This creature attacked me with a stick," the patrol agent protested calmly. "The last thing I expected on this planet was to be attacked by a wild animal."

"Not an animal. A young primitive," the Doctor answered seriously. The Tessilons will evolve into people of great power and intelligence one day. "I'll ask you again. Put her down."

The agent set the child down on her feet, likely for no reason other than that he saw no further reason to hold onto her, and not out of fear or intimidation at all. The child ran off into the crowd of her playmates and quickly they hurried away. Hailey put the boy down and he raced off after them.

"I asked you once before to leave the Tessilons of Matraxian Jarvo alone," the Doctor snapped at the agent. "I fail to see the interest your people have in a race of primitives anyway. Certainly not technology. They will not even invent the wheel for another eight thousand years."

"The last thing I need to deal with right now is a meddling Time Lord," the agent snapped right back. He was stressed to a point uncharacteristic of his people. That much was plainly obvious. "Whatever happened to never interfering? And you're so sure my being here has something to do with those furry pests, aren't you."

"Doesn't it?"

"The radio back at headquarters malfunctioned," the agent said. He sounded bored of the whole encounter. "We began to pick up signals that should never have picked up at all. Things completely irrelevant to us. Apparently some woman on a planet lightyears away was pulled over this morning for speeding in a hover car. We don't need to know that sort of thing. It's mearly a sign that something is sending in some severe interference. I was on my way somewhere entirely different today, but the teleport brought me here. It was only when I arrived that I discovered the interference originated here. Of course it's occupied by primitives, so you can imagine my confusion over this."

"Electrical interference?" the Doctor was over his annoyance in an instant and now interested in what the agent had to say.

"Strange things have been occurring for days now, Doctor. Just yesterday one of my team mates finally returned to headquarters hours late. He reported he'd ended up on Earth while trying for an entirely different location. Apparently he might have had a run in with you and your friend over there, who were also possibly lost yourselves. Teleports have been acting up for a week now. Radios have been getting strange and unwanted signals. Five our our men have gotten unexpected shocks from things that should not be dangerous."

"I can understand that. We've had a couple of those problems too. Have you got any ideas?"

"No," the agent said sharply. "And we have no wish to stay on this planet any longer. The natives are nothing more than savages. I have no wish for either myself or any other of my people to find ourselves mauled in the dark of night by those four beasts that you call the future of great power and intellect. I am leaving to pursue this matter from the safety of headquarters. I shall leave you to the beasts if you wish, Time Lord."

"If you don't want trouble with the Tessilons then simply stop trying to provoke them!" the Doctor responded in frustration. But the agent was already well prepared to leave. He took a few steps back, and pressed a bottom on the device he wore around his wrist. Instantly he was long gone and out of sight.

The children's panic and shouting it seemed must have drawn the attention of nearby Tessilon adults, because at that moment four of them appeared at the tree line. All four of them held sharp tipped hunting spears in their hands. All of them wore the simple clothing typical of their race, small fur lined boots over their feet and loosely fitted thin coats over their bodies. One of them, clearly the one female of the little group, wore a ratty fabric cloth wrapped over her head and held a small baby in a simple but swell secured infant carrying cloth over her shoulders. The female, regardless of the fact that she was carrying a baby with her, and that her spear tip reached over the hight of her head when the other end rested on the dirt, could obviously handle her weapon as well as the men. It was her who stepped forward, shouting at the Doctor and Hailey, in abrupt and harshly spoken short sounds. She pointed toward the ground nearby, where the agent had kicked up the leaves in his fury and had left tiny pieces of the once captured child's lost fur scattered over the general area he'd been standing in. The child had eventually dropped her stick, and the female found that quickly too, holding it up and waving it a bit while shouting louder. It was clear she wondered if the two Time Lords had been the ones who had made the mess and hurt the child. She may well have even meant to accuse them of it. Hailey fond herself wondering, filled more and more with sinking dread all the while, if this was the unfortunate child's mother. She glanced toward the baby and saw that the infant was clearly only a year old or so. The older child had been perhaps five. Certainly the age difference made sense. This female could well be the mother of both of them.

"Oh, hello Miss," the Doctor said, stepping toward the confused and annoyed female with confidence. "The mess out here? Yeah, we had a bit of trouble with another visitor to your planet. He left on his own, so no real trouble there. The child is fine too. Now that's a little one who knows how to take care of herself, if I ever saw one."

"Doctor," Hailey whispered, "can she even understand a word you're saying?"

"TARDIS translation circuits," the Doctor whispered back. "It might not work perfectly with a primitive, but it still works."

"I do not think it was you that was responsible," the Tessilon said, leaving Hailey surprised to find that she heard her words as English. She was well used to exactly that from far more advanced races, but with a Tessilon it was just bewildering. "The child of my brother's mate was harmed by an outsider. Such things cannot be ignored. This is a safe place. We do not want trouble in a safe place."

"Of course not," the Doctor gave his agreement, trying to keep it known that he was siding with her. "And any reasonable race would draw the line at someone scaring their children."

"Have you come to help us to understand?" the Tessilon questioned. "Were you sent to us to make the object from the stars make sense to us?"

"Object from the stars," the Doctor asked. Now he was very interested.

He pointed toward his ship, just barely visible through the trees. "You don't mean that little blue box do you?"

"No," the Tessilon's eyes were open wider with excited wonder. "Such a small thing holds so little interested compared to the fallen object. The prophecy speaks of such a thing, and I think the shining object was what it meant to speak of. Many disagree. No one can be certain."

"Something fell from the sky then?" Hailey asked. "So you mean like a meteor, or more like a crashed or landed spaceship?"

The Tessilon looked at her blankly for a moment. Finally she tipped her head first to one side then the other, showing no comprehension at all.

"Hailey," the Doctor said quietly. "Her people have barely come to understand numbers past four or five. They think of weather as a warnings or gifts from their unseen gods. I hardly think she'll know what a meteor or a spaceship is."

"Oops" was the young lady's only response.

"Miss, I just need to talk with my friend for a minute. Excuse us please?" the Doctor said to the Tessilon. The primitive female nodded and sat down on the grass nearby with the baby, still in the carrier, on her lap.

"So, what you do think?' the Doctor asked his companion. "Somewhere around here something crashed or landed or somehow fell to the surface of the planet. That may well related to all that signal interference, navigation trouble and such lately."

"Well if it is that that's doing it, I don't think it's a meteor."

"Neither do I. It couldn't be to do all that. Man made for sure."

"So what are you..."

"Well, something big and shiny and obviously out of place on this planet. We should look into this one. What do you think?"

Hailey only nodded her agreement, excited at the prospect of a new adventure.

The Doctor turned back to their Tessilon friend. "You wouldn't know of anyone who could show us out to the fallen object from the sky, would you. Perhaps a hunting party goes that way from time to time, or someone could draw us a rough map."

The Tessilon female's answer surprised them both. She stood up from the grass, picked up her hunting spear again, and carrying it and the infant, she walked closer to them quickly. "I will take you out that way myself. We would need a day or two to get ready for such a journey, and with a young one, I need slightly more time to get her things ready. But I would happily go. I am as curious as any about the object and the prophecy."


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N; I do intend to soon get into more of the plot involving the 'fallen object' but not quite in this chapter. Most of this one was unplanned and just something I decided to write, because I do enjoy writing alien worlds from time to time. I loved the idea of writing something involving the primitive natives of Matraxian Jarvo, so I decided to add a bit of that in before really getting into the main point of the story. **

The time traveling adventurers had seen more of Matraxian Jarvo in the past two days than they had imagined existed in the first place. Moving at a quick walking pace they'd covered at least twenty kilometers on that second day alone, and as much distance on the first. Their small but surprisingly intelligent and strong guide had held fast to an insistence that they had follow the river as much as possible, and walking next to the stream, they'd passing through marshland where their feet sank into warm fresh water, and through fields of dry sparse brush.

What the Tessilon called a river, the visitors would at first have called a stream. But it had quickly become obvious why to the Tesslions it was a river. By the end of the first day's travel they were walking next to a rapidly flowing body of water, that churned and raced and splashed up into their faces if they stood too close in parts. They both saw the plain and sensible logic in their guide's thinking though. The water was clean and cool and fresh and walking near it they always had a good supply to drink from whenever they wished.

The days on that part of Matraxian Jarvo were hot and humid but the nights cooled off as soon as the sun went down. Hailey, sitting up against a tree wide awake on that second night, opened the pack she'd been given by the Tessilons to carry on her trip, and took out her warm knitted sweater, that she'd stuffed in there when the sun grew too hot. She slipped it on over her head and sat happily staring at the fire that still burned nearby. The fire their guide had explained to them the day before, had to be left burning all the time they rested, in order to keep the large and vicious animals away from their camp.

The Tessilon female, despite the obvious risk of animals nearby, slept soundly on the animal hide she used as a comfortable ground cover, with her tired infant child close to her. The Doctor, who of course so seldom slept at all, sat awake by himself at the other side of the fire, resting against a fallen tree, holding a rock in his hand. Hailey made her way closer to him, careful not to wake the guide or the baby.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Nothing too interesting really," the Doctor replied, slightly startled by his companion's sudden presence. "Just looking at this rock. It's not this one rock itself, but everything here that amazes me. It's all so new. Matraxian Jarvo is no more than 500 million years old. That's so young for a planet. I've heard of some so young but I've never gotten around to visiting one before."

"I wonder what it'll look like once it's the age the Earth is now."

"Oh nothing like the world you see now. Nature will take it's course here. Climates will change, and continents will shift. The rivers will change their courses, and mountains will rise up where it's all now flatland. Even some of the wildlife here will die off and leave a way for others to come into being. And the Tessilons will see it all, generation by generation. Just like the human race you came from, they will see their world and society change a tiny bit at a time."

"I know all that of course. I know that evolution changes everything a piece at a time on every planet in the universe. Still though it's so hard to imagine it for real. So hard to think that one day all this will be cities and freeways and little pink furballs honking car horns and shouting at each other in rush hour traffic."

"Perhaps when we are all done here, we should hit fast forward so to speak," the Doctor suggested. "Take the TARDIS a million years or so into the future and land it back here again, so that we can see for ourselves just what becomes of this place and our little friends."

"Sounds interesting,' Hailey agreed. She leaned forward on the ground, and got into her knees, spending a moment to pick up small fallen twigs and branches from the trees overhead. With her little pile in her arms, she moved ahead to put them carefully onto the fire, remembering the Tessilon's warnings to be sure it was always burning. She leaned back against the fallen tree near her friend. Both of them sat in silence for a while looking out over the dark landscape, and the shapes of trees silluoetted by the firelight. From somewhere close by they could heard a sound that closely resembled the chipping of crickets back on earth. Hailey's attention shifted to the stars high above. Matraxian Jarvo was still unchanged by city lights or distant motorways. She could stars glowing everywhere overhead.

"So what do you think?' the Doctor asked. His question was vague of course but his companion understand at once what he meant.

"I'm not sure I'll ever get used to it," she answered quietly, still watching the sky. "Being on different worlds and seeing that in every part of the galaxy the stars are all different. I've never really looked before anywhere else. It's always been to busy or just too bright. Here though there's no big dipper, no north star, nothing I recognize at all. Earth's sun must be out there somewhere but even that's so far away I wouldn't know which star it is even if it was visible from here."

"It is visible from out here," the Doctor said slowly, thinking intently and obviously trying to get his own bearings straight. He pointed up into the sky to the left of where his companion was sitting. "See that dimmer looking star over there? The one that looks like it sort of blinks and fades out a bit from time to time?"

"Yeah. I see it."

"That's it."

"It's not as bright as I always thought it was back home." Hailey said. "Then again, of course the books always did say earth's sun was certainly not the biggest or the brightest of stars."

"Doctor," she said after a few moment spent in happy and peaceful silence. "What was your mother like?"

The Doctor looked away from the sky and stared at his friend for a moment in surprise at her question. Finally he simply muttered, " well that's a random question if there ever was one."

Hailey laughed a little. "I just remember you saying something the other day about how she had red hair sort of like mine. But that's all you said. It just made me wonder is all. From the way you talked about her, it sounded like she was a good person."

"She was. She always believed in fairness and doing whatever you thought was right. She was by biggest defending growing up."

"Biggest defender?" Hailey echoed, a bit shocked and slightly puzzled by his words.

"My father was so understanding toward my older sisters, but he never stopped being impossibly hard on me. Even before I was shipped off to the academy he was constantly saying I'd never be anything to be proud of if I didn't practice harder with numbers. He hated that I couldn't tie my shoes at four years old. It just never seemed to stop. Yet every time in those early years, he'd say such a thing to me, my mother would jump in to defend me. So many nights I'd hear them fighting in the kitchen, always over me. My father would say I;d never be good enough for society and my mother would insist every time, quite loudly I might add, that she wouldn't want any other son than the one she had."

"I'm sure I would have liked her."

"You probably would have. And she'd have liked you so much too. She believed in the impossible. I suppose that's where I got it from. If someone said something couldn't happen, she'd ask them why we still existed if not to find out what really could and couldn't be done. She'd have been so happy to meet a Human Time Lord, if for no other reason than that everyone had always said that one could never live."

"She was a bit mouthy too," the Doctor continued. He'd obviously been a bit unsure at first about talking about his childhood. But now that he was doing just that, he got more and more caught up in his own story of the past. "Gallifreyans were never known to tell it like it as, as you say on Earth. But she would do it often. I remember she came to the academy once in the middle of the year. Our parents didn't normally visit us much at all. Only at the yearly open house and during the few visiting days. I guess someone must have sent a letter home about me again. Yes, that happened several, most years. I didn't hear this myself but a friend told me later that she had shown up at the school unannounced, ranting about how letters home would fix nothing and how a little more understanding would."

"So what happened then?"

"Well as far as I heard, she basically called the head master a pigheaded, narrowminded, snob, while they were standing in the middle of the main hallway of the school building. The headmaster wasn't one to listen to very many people. He certainly wasn't intimidated easily at all. My friend said though, he was sure my mother had scared him a bit." For a moment they both grinned at the mental image.

The sun began to rise sooner than it seemed it should have by Earth standards and Hailey remembered quickly that while an Earth day was twenty-four hours long, a full day on Matraxian Jarvo was only fifteen. The shortness of the day, combined with the fact that it was currently the hight of summer, made the night go by so quickly.

The Tessilon female got up from her bedding on the ground at the other side of the fire and came to two travelers, holding her infant. Without a word at first she held the child out, clearly expecting Hailey to take her. Unsure exactly what she was to do, the young woman took the tiny child and made sure she had a firm hold on her.

"I will return very soon," the Tessilon said. "Please take care of her."

"Umm... Okay.. I can try..." Hailey muttered uncertainly. But the guide had already began to walk toward the river nearby, holding her spear tightly with one hand.

The baby, who upon looking at her closer seemed to be about seven or eight months old, and was physically smaller than an average human newborn, shivered slightly from the slight chill that still hung in the air. Hailey pulled the edges of the child's carrying cloth around her tiny body carefully. She feared she might hurt her. She'd never held a child so small before. The young Time Lord took a moment to study the small Tessilon, and she could see that the baby was very much a perfectly formed and very miniature version of her people. The infant waved two little pink fuzzy hands in the air until much like a human child she managed to get her thumb into her mouth. She looked around for a second or two, sucking her thumb and observing the scenery with contentment before she began to cry and wiggle around, trying to get free. Hailey experimentally put her down on the grass in front of her and was surprised to find that the infant girl could sit up perfectly well by herself.

Their guide returned to the campsite within half an hour carrying her spear in her left hand and a couple good sized fish in her right. From her pack, which she opened after putting it down on the ground, she took a little sack filled with fresh red berries.

"We have a good amount of dried food in the packs," she said simply, "but fresh fish is better when I can catch some. We will cook these over the fire before we add more fuel to it."

"What's the baby's name?" Hailey asked the Tessilon guide a short while later, as they all worked to pack up their things, put out the fire by throwing dirt onto it, and gather up the infant, who had crawled slightly closer to the water. "Do you have names at all?"

"Yes," the Tessilon said. She put her pack on her back again and tied the carrying cloth over her shoulder. "My child's name is Calling For Rain."

"Why would you call her that?"

"Because, on the day she born we'd been asking the gods for rain for many days. We needed it for our plants. Even the animals we were to hunt would have left our land if it had become too dry. She was born on the day the tribe grew desperate enough to ask for a sign that we should stay where we were. We had think she might have been our sign. That same night it rained, and so she got her name."

"That's pretty cool really. So then what's you name? Something relating to your birth day too?"

"No. Those names are only used as infant names. We are renamed several times in our lives. My adult name is She That Runs Far."

"My name is Hailey."

"But what does that mean?"

"It doesn't really mean anything, I don't think. It's just my name."

The Tessilon looked at her for a moment in confusion for a moment unable to understand a new concept. Finally she started walking forward and the other's quickly followed her.

The two time travelers and the Tessilon walked for the morning along a well worn trail next to the river, a path used commonly by hunting parties. The baby rode in her carrying cloth, sitting up so that she could see out. They discovered that they had landed originally at a higher elevation. That morning they began to decend quickly and carefully down low grade hills into what began to look like it must have been a valley of some sort. The trees were thicker here, and the underbrush grew everywhere it could. Their travels were slower because of it, but they still made a few kilometers that morning.

Overhead a flock of considerably large red and yellow birds circled the sky, squealing and squawking noisily. Once in a while one of two of them would dive straight down into the threes and swoop back up again with some dead creature in it's beak. One came close to the traveling group once and Hailey was particularly nervous about it. It sat for a moment perched lightly on a lower branch of a huge tree three meters away, and from that short distance she could see that it was almost big enough that it could have picked up a Tessilon with little effort. She was concerned for the guide and certainly for the infant. But the Tessilon female showed little concern about it. She even paused for a second in her steps to point the giant bird out to her child, who pointed it it herself smiling. The bird flew away a second later, and went back up into the air to continue circling with the flock.

The roaring growl of an animal caught their attention next and looking around a bit they all stopped something that looked a lot like a black bear with the antlers of a deer, on the other side of the river. It was dipping it's enormous front paw into the water repeatedly, until finally it came up again holding a fish in it's grasp. A short ways up the bank, still on the opposite side, three smaller versions of the creature, all with tiny antlers of their own rolled and wrestled around on the grassy bank. In the course of their energetic playing, the smallest of the three young ones rolled too far and too fast down the river bank.. It landed in the cool water with a splash. Hailey found herself laughing at it's antics as it climbed back out again, shaking it;sef like a wet dog.

After several hours of moving as fast as they could they found a small clearing amid the trees and the brush. They sat down on the grass and took their packs off again. The Tessilon turned her baby loose on the ground and set about preparing to build a fire for cooking. Hailey watched the female as she kneed on the ground patiently spinning a long stick first one way then the other between her two hands with the end rolling constantly through day grass, leaves, and a few twigs.

"Want me to try for a while?" she asked, seeing that it was taking longer than it often did. The guide showed her only once exactly how to do it before Hailey saw the simple science behind it. The friction of the constant rubbing of the materials on each other would eventually create enough heat to to start the fire burning. She leaned over it closer and tried to get it smoking a bit.

"Let me help," the Doctor said, hurrying over and digging through his jacket pocket. "The sonic screwdriver has a setting for starting a fire. Why didn't someone just ask me for help. You two are going to be at that for hours."

"Doctor," Hailey said, not as glad of his help as he'd clearly expected she'd be. She kept her eyes on the spinning stick, worried that if she worked while not watching what she was doing, she might set the stick itself on fire and burn herself. "We can't just come into a primitive society and start lighting fires for them with advanced technology. That's cheating."

"I suppose," the Doctor muttered to himself. He flopped down onto the ground in the way a child might. "But the ground's not as dry as it was the last few times. I don't think you can start a fire like that."

"Oh come on Doctor, didn't you ever go on overnight nature trips with the academy or anything? You know, live off the land, stay out in nature with no technology or anything?"

"No," the Doctor said, still pouting mildly. "They would have said that sounded silly."

Hailey half ignored him, shaking her head a little as she went on working with the stick. A bit of smoke rose up from round the bottom of it. She kept going, even faster now. A tiny spark caught the brush and a tiny flame began to burn. She stopped turning the stick and careful and slowly fed a small twig to the flame. It grew bigger. She added more fuel, before standing up, and quickly backing away from the rapidly rising flames.

"Ha ha" she cried with excitement. "We have our fire!"

She turned to the Tessilon female, who was busy keeping a good eye on her actively crawling and curious child. The guide looked a second at the fire with satisfied approval, and still watching her child she kneeled down to retrieve the cooking supplies from her pack. The infant was busy amusing herself, crawling around on the grass and exploring, touching anything she could get her little fingers on. She stood for a second by herself and looked around from her new position on two feet, before dropping back to her hands and knees and crawling quickly toward something that had quite obviously caught her interest.

Hailey was busy helping the guide with some cooking, holding meat wrapped around sticks, over the fire. The Doctor, having little to do at that moment, tried to be helpful by watching the baby. The very young children of any intelligent race in the universe were basically primitive beings as he understood it. So he reasoned that an infant primitive should be no different from an infant of anyone else. True to his logic, she wasn't unlike either human or Gallifrayan babies at all. She just threatened to get into everything she shouldn't had her hands everywhere they shouldn't have been and was at constant risk of getting out of his sight in a second.

He turned away from her for a blink of an eye, and the unthinkable happened. The baby did indeed get out of sight. In an instant he was on his feet, looking around frantically for the tiny Tessilon. He reminded himself that she couldn't have gone far. It had only been a fraction of a second and she couldn't even walk yet. Yet in the back of his mind he knew as well that a baby could move pretty fast of their hands and knees. He looked around again and still he didn't see or hear her. Quickly he ran off into the trees a little ways in the most logical direction. He could only assume and hope that the baby had gone toward open area of the woods and would stay on the grass. The Doctor didn't even bother to say a word still hoping he could find the baby before her mother even noticed anything had happened. The guide was certainly reasonable and even capable of conversing, but still her spear skills scared him under the current circumstances.

The sudden startled and pained cry of a young infant sounded from very close by. Turning toward the sound he ran faster than before, and before he even had time to think about action at all, he'd picked up the crying baby from the ground a couple of meters away. He'd held babies many times during his long life and had so often thought he was decent with children when the need for such a skill arose. He'd picked up the young of many races throughout the years, but this little Tessilon was by far the smallest he'd ever had to pick up. Calling For Rain was old enough to sit up and crawl, yet she could not have weighed more than three kilograms.

The baby started to settle down again now that she understood she was safe. But she held the fingers of one hand stiffly in the air. She also continuated to pout a little with what could only be pain. The Doctor looked carefully at her hand, and saw only that it was very slightly reddened. He took her little hand between his fingers and rubbed it slightly. That was all it took to make her stop crying. He looked down where he'd found her and reasoned that she must have simply banged her hand on the little metal box that lay on the sparse grass very close by, at the foot of a huge and towering tree.

"There we are then, little tiny person," he said to the baby, who of course could not understand a word he said, but did look curious nevertheless. "See, not so bad at all. Just a little metal box thing. And this is why you must never wander off. I tell people that all the time. You wouldn't be the first who didn't listen..."

He stopped speaking abruptly, and stood for a moment in the middle of the woods with a small fuzzy baby in his arms feeling like an absent minded fool. With a baffled shake of his head he declared out loud to no one in particular, "Now wait a minute. Why is there a little box here. How can there even be one here at all?'

The Tessilon female, having heard her child's cries, hurried over at that moment. The Doctor passed the baby back to her, and she took her, and looked her over quickly, before calmly taking a couple of steps back. Obviously she was satisfied the baby was fine. Hailey ran over quickly herself right behind the guide. She was concerned about the baby too, but she noticed the Doctor staring in surprise at a small out of place metal box on the ground.

The Tessilon carried her child back to sit with her near the fire. She had no comprehension at all regarding the new discovery. It was small and didn't do anything at all. She would barely have even seen it as significant at all. And if she could understand that at all, she would only have assumed that the visitors to her world were taking care of the matter better than she could.

The Doctor dropped to his knees next to the box and brushed some dirt from the top with one hand. He scanned it once and then again with the sonic screwdriver. He tapped the front of it gently with couple of his fingers, and then stayed still for a moment just looking at it in confusion.

"Doctor, what is that?" Hailey asked quietly kneeling beside him hesitantly. "It's not... dangerous is it?"

"No," the Doctor muttered distractedly, and without even looking at her. "It isn't anything dangerous."

Speaking far more to himself out loud than to his companion he said, "how can it be here? Who left it here of all places."

"Doctor?"

"A relic buried for centuries and suddenly discovered after some hunters dug it up I could maybe understand, but this is new. How can it be new?"

"Doctor!" Hailey demanded, slightly concerned by his tone of voice and the look in his eyes. "What are you on about? What is that thing?"

"Hailey," the Doctor said. He actually sounded shaky as he got to his feet, carefully bringing the little box with him. "This is a recently manufactured piece of genuine Time Lord technology!"

"Newly manufactured? But how... Anything that remains of Gallifrey and the Time Lords should be ancient now. A piece of something new has to mean..."

The Doctor all but ignored her, barely able to comprehend her words anyway. He stood for a couple of long moments staring at the box in disbelief. First he looked might he might laugh, then he looked like he might cry. Finally he looked like he might do either or both and it was impossible to tell which. Time seemed to drag on before he made another sound but finally he spoke again. "I have no idea what to think. I should never get my hopes... no, our hopes up so high. But there may be surviving Time Lords somewhere!"


	7. Chapter 7

**This chapter is a reposted one that I'd decided to party rewrite. After posing it the first time I realized it really made no sense the way I'd done it... so I changed it. The end is quite different now but there are a couple of small changes earlier on as well. Anyway now that this one is up again, I will go and finish chapter eight very soon. **

"Doctor, what are you saying?" Hailey questioned in bewilderment. The two of them sat next to each other on the fallen log near the fire. "That there might really be surviving Time Lords out there somewhere, and maybe even on this planet?"

"I can't bare to say yes," the Doctor answered slowly. "I can't even bring myself to think much about the possibility. There's still such a good chance it's all some kind of trick, or that somehow that box fell through a rift of something. I can't hold out hope only to have it all crushed again."

"So what is it anyway. I know it's a little metal box that may have belonged to the Time Lords, but what does it do?" Hailey, though she certainly did not want to grow too hopeful or too excited by discovery, could not help but grow increasingly curious. She reached out to take the box hoping to give it a much closer look and her friend handed it to her carefully. She turned it over in her hands studying it in wonder, barely daring to believe she held something from her father's world in both hands.

"It looks like it has moving parts inside. It must open somehow, maybe with this little catch underneath," she mused with mounting excitement. Doctor, could it contain the secrets of time and space? Perhaps the formulas for elements humans have not even discovered yet? I imagine it must be something barely comprehendible in this box!"

The Doctor laughed slightly, before answering in complete seriousness, "don't get too far ahead of yourself here. It's just a low level information storage drive."

"What do you think might have been stored on it?"

"No idea whatsoever. We'd need the TARDIS to read the digital files. Hailey, turned that box upside down for a second."

"Okay..." she quickly did so. She saw that the bottom of the box contained a bit of text.

"Can you read that?" the Doctor asked.

"I don't know. Maybe. Why, what does it say?"

"No idea. I haven't looked at it close enough to read it. But you might as well try to translate the text. No use in falling behind on your lessons now."

Hailey studied the text carefully for a couple of minutes, trying to understand how it might read in a correct and logical order.

"Gallifreyan Academy of Education," she read slowly out loud. "Data storage, model 657, school issue number 18-361."

The Doctor took the box back from her in shock at her words. He reread the text himself before saying quietly in disbelief. "This is just some school issue data unit. I remember having one almost like this. Every student got one for our digital storage."

"So this might belong, or used to belong, to some Academy kid?"

The Doctor nodded hesitantly. "This is just getting stranger and stranger. How'd this get out here?"

"Some intergalactic bully stole some Time Lord kid's computer and dropped it here to hide the evidence?" Hailey suggested, partly serious and lacking any better idea.

"Yes but where would it and the student who owned it have come from? It just can't be."

"Well... maybe it was taken from a museum somewhere."

"Could be. But still it looks so new. Something so well preserved for thousands of years is so hard to find."

"Yes, but Doctor, that would explain why someone stole it in the first place. And why he was chased to the point he dumped it on this planet. A well preserved antique from a lost race would be of unimaginable value wouldn't it?"

Neither of them wanted to hope. Neither dared to dream or to let themselves think that maybe the box had simply been dropped by a Time Lord very recently. Both thought of it and both wanted to say it to the other, but they couldn't. Hailey knew how much the Doctor hoped every day that he might somehow against all odds find he had been wrong about being alone, and at the same time, the Doctor knew how much Hailey would have wanted to meet other Time Lords if she could. Neither simply dared to raise the other's hopes too much, now that they held a piece of their own civilization so close to them.

The Doctor turned then to their guide, who sat quietly near the fire feeding her baby and saying nothing. "What exactly does the prophecy say about an object falling from the sky?" He walked over and held the box out to her. "Could this be the object they say will fall?"

The Tessilon took a quick and curious look at the thing before turning back to the child. She answered very simply but with great assurance. "No. it is much too small."

The Doctor flopped down onto the ground next to her, speaking insistently, "Okay fair enough. But what exactly does the prophecy say. Can you recite the whole thing?"

"Yes," the Tessilon said thoughtfully. "In the summer of an early age unknown, an object from the stars, and bigger then the greatest of all known creatures, will fall though history itself and from the sky above. Without seeing or knowing or comprehension, we will meet ourselves. The now and the then, the then and the now."

"What does that mean, then then and the now, and the now and the then?"

The Tessilon looked at the Time Lord, unable to help him in the face of his desperate need to understand.

"I am sorry," she said. "I can't say I know. No one knows yet what it means. But the shaman saw the prophecy seasons ago and insists that though she herself cannot say what it means, it's all true and one day will come to be. We have shared it with other tribes and learned that their own shamans and wise ones have seen the same thing."

"How do your shamans and wise ones get their visions?" Hailey asked. She made her way over to sit with them and join the conversation as well.

"There is a place on a mountain far away," the Tessilon explained. "No one but a shaman knows just what happens there, but each year they gather there. The shamans from each of the tribes of the Tessilons travel for many days to spend half of the winter season learning and sharing together. When the return they share with us what they have seen and what might help our tribes. Some that on the mountain one can see into all of time itself and that is how they see the things there are to bring back to share with the people."

"Doctor," Hailey whispered to her friend, "that's just...wow..."

"Yes," the Doctor whispered back. "Certainly odd."

"And familiar in a way," Hailey pointed out with obvious excitement. "Doctor, that prophecy and the story of the mountain, that sounds a bit Time Lord-ish."

The Doctor said nothing at all in response. He only nodded, wide eyed with shocked disbelief.

Anxious to keep going and with no reason to stay where they where, the group decided to start walking again. The guide put out the fire and the Doctor put the little data storage box into his pack. Within a short time they were following the river again happily. Hailey walked behind the guide and the Doctor followed her. After a short while of walking silently alone, thinking her own thoughts and listening to the splashing of the river against it's high banks, she slowed her pace to let him catch up.

"So, what do you think?" she asked slowly. "About this Time Lord computer box thing I mean. Do you think it;s actually true that the Time Lords are back, or is it really just a museum piece?"

"I can't say for sure," the Doctor replied honestly. "Given the new information, I think there's really something too all this. But still I can;t stand to become too hopeful. I've dared to hope before and things have just gone very wrong."

"I understand," Hailey said quietly. The Doctor turned to look at her, while still keeping up his walking pace perfectly.

"Please don't get your hopes up too high either," he said seriously. "Whatever happens don't risk that kind of disappointment. Of course it's fun to dream and to imagine, but we never know what we might find."

"I won't hope for too much," Hailey promised.

"Seriously though,' she said excitedly, stepping onto a fallen log that covered a short distance next to their path and balancing on it with her arms out beside her while she walked. "What do you really think it is that's here? How'd that box really get out here?"

The Doctor looked at her for a moment deciding whether or not he could and should really tell her anything at all. Finally he said honestly, "this whole situation is very confusing, even to me. That prophecy does sound a bit Time Lord related, you're right about that. But that little information storage device seems to have belonged to some student from the academy. I can't imagine how that could fit into place. Basically though, even with pieces of the puzzle still missing, I'm starting to really think was something left of our people after all."

Hailey, despite her promise to not get her hopes up too high or to get too excited, grinned happily. In that moment, watching his companion balancing on the log and almost jumping up and down with joy, the Doctor knew he would hate to dash her hopes even more than his own. Choosing his words carefully he spoke again. "Even if I am right, remember that we have have no idea exactly who is it we are going to find. Remember what I've explained to you a couple of times. Not all of us were the good guys."

The young lady nodded, but still she could barely stop grinning anyway.

The little group made it's way forward until they reached a place where the river, shallow in that part, came right up to the tree line with no way past the water. With the stream in front of them and a steep incline of unstable ground and dry hard dirt that crumbled as soon as they touched it behind and beside them, they knew there was only one course of action. With their footwear off and stuffed into the packs, they waded out onto the water, intent on crossing it.

At first the two visitors took small careful and hesitant steps, each worried they might lose their footing on something slippery or step on sharp rocks, but watching their guide walk with quick confidant steps even while carrying a child with her, they quickly gained confidence themselves. Beneath their feet were mostly large rocks of good size and with nice flat tops. And they were smooth and easy to stand on too. The current was still pretty strong and fast but the water came only about one quarter of the way to their knees. It was warmer than they'd expected too. Still slightly cool, but they quickly got used to the water temperature. The Tessilon, who was of course considerably smaller than the visitors, stood closer to knee deep in the river but still she was confidant in footing.

About halfway across, the Tessilon guide stopped suddenly. Hailey and the Doctor stopped right behind her, unsure what to do next or why she had stopped in the first place. They worried that she might have stopped danger or even become stuck in some unseen mud, but in a second they saw her raise her spear. She brought it down with one impossibly fast motion then over the water and right into the flowing current. When she picked it up again a fish was speared and dead on the pointed end. The Tessilon grinned with her success, and paused for a moment staring down and watching for the next passing fish. Abruptly she tried again and once more she succeeded.

"That's so cool," Hailey said in wonder, watching the guide. "How'd you ever learn to do that?"

"Fishing is a simple survival skill," the Tessilon answered. "Before we are old enough to join the hunt, we learn to catch fish. It is easy to do, but you must be fast."

The Tessilon held her spear out to the young lady, obviously wanting her to try it herself. Hailey shook her head at first laughing a little at the unlikelihood of being able to such a thing with any success at all. With a slight amount of coaxing though she hesitantly took the small spear and held it over the water watching for a fish to pass underneath. Within seconds one good sized one did, and she brought the spear down toward it. Too slow though she saw quickly, as she spotted the fish's retreating tail. She tried again several times, but every time she missed completely. The spear splashed hard into the water every time she brought it down and she shifted her feet a little, making more splashes and ripples. The Tessilon laughed a little with amusement.

"You are making too much noise," she advised. "Frightening away the fish with all that splashing. Less and less will pass by while you are warning them you want to catch them."

Hailey smiled in understanding of her logic. She reasoned again for hardly the first time during their journey that the Tessilons were so far from the simple unintelligent mindless creatures it was easy to see them as at first. The first time she'd seen their planet and met a few of them, she'd seem then only as curious somewhat clever animals, that might one day evolve into intelligent life. Her journey with a Tessilon though had taught her that they were already that intelligent race she'd thought they might one day become. She'd learned to think of them entirely as people, not unlike herself, the Doctor, and everyone she knew back on Earth.

"I see too that my spear is much too small for you," the Tessilon said, once again using the reasoning and observational skills that had at first come as a shock to the young Time Lord girl. "If you ever wish to return some day to us to visit and to learn and see more, perhaps join the hunt and learn to fish as well as us, you will need a spear closer to your own height."

Hailey, though the thought of returning one day to that same period of time and living for a while among the Tessilons had never really occurred to her, she thought it over quickly in that moment. She realized right away that it was not something she could really see herself doing. Nevertheless though, she was flattered to receive the implied offer anyway.

The guide walked the rest of the way across the river quickly and put the two fish down on the bank. She came back just as quickly, before the other two were even close to having caught up to her again. She carefully took the baby out of the carrying cloth and put her down into the water, holding her so that she could stand on the bottom with her head still above water level. Hailey found herself concerned for a moment, worried that the child would began crying from cold or fright. She found herself wondering in dismay why a mother, even a primitive one, would would dare to submerge her tiny child in the river anyway. To her great surprise though, the baby began to kick her feet, laughing. She did not even stay standing on the rocks below, but instead, with her mother, now kneeling in the water, still holding her firmly, she began trying to the swim around a bit. She even dared to put her head right underneath and clearly knew to hold her breath while doing so. Very soon, instead of the screaming and very upset child she had expected, they had a soaking wet baby laughing and splashing her arms through the water until she put her own head in yet again.

"Well I never would have imagined," Hailey said to the Doctor with amusement," It seems Tessilons love water. Even the little baby ones."

The Doctor only nodded slowly. Obviously he'd already known that all along.

After the short time spent in the river, the two Tessilons making a point of getting as wet as they could, and the two Time Lords trying hard to avoid doing exactly that as they were still almost fully dressed, they all climbed up onto the river bank. They built another fire, this time in a small fire pit built by a Tessilon hunting party and left for whoever else wished to use it. They sat around it cooking the fish the guide had quickly gutted and cleaned while Hailey once again succeeded in starting the fire with a long straight stick, and some small dry twigs and leaves. The Tessilon baby sat with the rest of the group this time, perched on a log between her mother and Hailey, drying off in the heat of the fire and looking around, smelling the smell of cooking fish and deciding it made her hungry.

Continuing on again, the group stayed on the narrow naturally occurring trail, between the tree line and the edge of the river. There was no real bank here, just a tiny step down to where water met land. They walked for a while on a straight path, until it suddenly turned sharply and began to drop at a steep angle. The Tessilon stopped walking and held up a hand. She looked around, considering something unknown, and then took a step forward slowly. She stopped again and backed up. Finally she turned back to the two visitors.

"This is as far as I may go," she said with a tone of such finality in her voice. "I sense that I am not meant to go any further now. All around us I can sense the feeling of change and power and hope and discovery. But this is meant for the two of you and was never for me."

"Can we find the way from here?" the Doctor asked. He was confidant as ever yet remaining cautious at the same time.

"It isn't far now," the Tessilon assured him. "Down into the valley and through the woods. There is a clearing there. I think that is the place you are to look for. There is a hunting party that will be making it's way back the way we came in the next several days. I will send a runner to bring them word that you may need a party to travel with back our camp."

"I can't say what will happen from here," the Doctor said, more than grateful for all of her help. If I don't meet up with the party we can find the way easily enough at another time. In any case thank you for everything you've done."

"I am a fellow adventure seeking. Though I cannot comprehend the idea of life from anywhere but here, I know it must exist because clearly you are here and not from this world at all. I can't say I can even imagine the place you've come from or the things you have seen, but I recognize a spirit of adventure, curiously and the thrill of discovery so close to my own. I must thank you for letting me travel with you all this way."

"It was nice meeting you," Hailey said. She looked for a moment at the infant in the carrying cloth and added, "both of you."

"You will always be welcomed here, strange travelers," the Tessilon said.

After a moment of goodbyes, the Doctor started down the steep decline carefully. Hailey followed after watching the guide turn back the way she had come. The path was a bit dangerous here, but danger had hardly stopped them before. With small and careful steps, and several moments taken to find there footing, they made it halfway down the hill. At that point it grew even steeper and unable to hod their balance well enough to walk straight, they found themselves turning slightly sideways and stepping down that way.

Their feet slipped a little in the loose fine dirt, and they had more and more trouble walking without falling. Hailey did fall once, nearly pushing the Doctor, who was in front of her, down by accident. She reached quickly for the branches of a tree near her, and used it to pull herself up. The Doctor tried much the same thing the first time he fell, but unable to reach anything he found himself on his hands and knees in the dirt.

It was Hailey's idea to turn around and half step, and half climb down backwards. Using the lowest branches of the trees nearest her, she always found hand holds and quickly she built her confidence and began to move faster again.

"Hailey," the Doctor called after her, while still trying to figure out for himself how to best go about get the rest of the way down the now impossibly steep hill without falling again. "Please be very careful. It's very steep, and still a long way down."

"I know that, Doctor," Hailey called back, with a laugh. "I'm fine. I'm still a good climber. Coming?"

The Doctor was not very used to having a companion that was bolder and more confidant than him in very many situations at all. But he was just not very good at anything involving steep hills. He could climb up and down ladders just fine, but when it came to steep hills and dirt and with only somewhat unstable trees as handhold and the ground as a foothold, he was half way to helpless. For another moment he stayed still trying to think of the best course of action and then finally took a long and careful moment to turn around without losing his balance. Watching his companion careful, he finally followed her example and made his way down after her.

"I think I'm a bit too old to be crawling around in the dirt," he said, brushing his hands over his clothes at the bottom of the hill, trying to rid himself of dust, dirt, and a few bits of grass and leaves.

"Oh come on," Hailey laughed, brushing off her own clothes. "You've traveled to the far edges of creation itself in your life. What's a bit of dirt? Just be thankful it didn't recently rain."

"I just hope this isn't all too much for you," the Doctor said, in a tone of concern. The two of them started to walk again, starting out into the dense forest before them. "When I asked you to come along I had it in mind that we would travel in the TARDIS, and see and save planets, and civilizations. I planned to show you history the easy way, and her I am having you spend days walking around on a planet of primitives, only to end up always with your face in the dirt."

"Are you kidding," Hailey cried, with a grin on her face. She stopped for a moment and turned around to look at him. "This has been the greatest time ever so far! I haven't only gotten to see a race in it's early history, We've gotten to learn from one of them, and interact and learn to see them all as people like us. We've been able to travel and fish and live the way the primitives did...or do. I never got to go on long hikes or camping trips or anything like that as a child. Children in the care homes were never allowed to do such things. They said it was too high risk. This has been beyond amazing!"

She ran off in front of him for a while then, wanting to run and explore the woods and listen to the birds overhead. He followed behind her, hoping she would not get lost and reminding himself to trust that she wouldn't. She was still very young as far by the standards of the Time Lords, and she was certainly hyper and excitable at times. But still, he knew that if she was going to travel with him for a while he had to let her run sometimes and trust her to know her own way.

"Doctor," Hailey called suddenly. She came to the edge of a very large clearing and stopped immediately. "There's someone down here. Several someones actually."

"A Tessilon hunting party?" the Doctor questioned, still making his way forward and still unable to see what she was talking about.

"No," Hailey was speaking quietly and with clear uncertainty, combined with excitement. "Not Tessilons at all. Not from the current time period either. And they look human."

The Doctor ran to catch up to her with so many different thought in his head at once that he barely knew what he was trying to think at all. He looked out over the clearing at a small group that sat on the farthest side of it, near the opposite tree line. He saw some much about that small group that looked so familiar and recognizable. Yet at the same time, so much about it held an air of complete unfamiliarity. Shaky, and a confused and barely daring to see the reality in anything he saw, he held up his hand.

"Stay here," he told his companion firmly in a voice that said he meant it. "Don't move from this spot. You can sit down if you want to, but beyond that, don't move."

"Doctor," Hailey whispered, suddenly made nervous by the urgency of his tone. She reached out and quickly took hold of his jacket sleeve before he could walk away from her. "Please explain this. What is it? Who are those people?"

"I'm not sure exactly who they are yet," the Doctor answered. "But I'm almost certain they are Time Lord survivors. I'll came back for you shortly. I need to go and try to talk to them. Please don't try to follow me."

"I won't."

"You have to mean it. Please promise you'll stay here and not move until I say you can."

Hailey looked at her friend and saw the seriousness and urgency in his eyes. He'd told her so many times to stay where he asked her, to now follow him, or not wander off. A couple of times years before, she'd disobeyed him, and a few more times she;d at least considered it. This time though she knew was different somehow.

"Okay," she said, and meant it. "I promise I'll stay right here."

The Doctor ran off across the clearing, and for a moment Hailey watched him. Slowly she sat down on the sparse grass just behind the tree line. She opened her pack and took out it's contents. She really had meant what she said when she promised not to move, and this seemed like a perfect chance to take some time to reorganize and sort her pack. She put on the sweater that she carried in there, deciding it was a bit chilly without it on. The rest of the things she carefully repacked after tipping the pack over to dump out a few leaves, and some dirt and small rocks.

She looked up then to see her friend across the grassy clearing, conversing intently with a blond haired woman who wore a long blue dress. Near the two of them, she saw that there were several other people, both males and females, all just sort of milling about and some of them appearing to chat amongst themselves. All of them had black pants on, and most had on black and white tops. A few though wore various colored jackets or overcoats on top of their clothes. She looked over the group from the distance, certain that they had no idea she was even there at all. She tried to stop herself from shaking as she began to fully comprehend and allow herself to finally believe that she was seeing her first glimpse of her father's people, aside from the Doctor and herself of course.

"Hailey," the Doctor's voice calling across the clearing dragged her back into the present moment. She stood up and looked at him from where she was, still determined to keep her promise and not move. He ran halfway back across toward her and and waved his hand, motioning for her to come over. It was with some hesitation that Hailey took a couple of steps forward. he motioned again and confidant now that she was indeed supposed to move, she hurried over to where he stood.

"We were right," he said as soon as she was close to him. "It's really ture, and many more seem to have survived than I imagined might have. This is amazing. I'm not even sure what's happened or how but..."

"Doctor? Are they good ones?"

"Yes. Or at least as far as anyone knows so far."

"What do you mean?"

"Hailey," the Doctor said. "This a part of it I can hardly comprehend myself, but they are mostly just a bunch of students. Young ones that insist they are from the Academy. Anyway they are certainly young, many are just children, and they certainly look like the students back in my day. Nearly the same school outfits as the one you wore at one point. I haven't even talked to anyone much yet. There's plenty of time for that. I just wanted to run back and get you right away. As far as I understand so far though it's just those students and a one of their school teachers. One of the school vehicles is down there too. I remember riding on busses like that so long ago!"

"I can't believe it," Hailey exclaimed following him slowly. "Time Lord students? So, like me, only with a class?"

"Well sort of, yeah."

"Will they want to meet me at all? The child of the unknown human." Hailey stopped suddenly and just stood where she was. "You were right when you said not to hope for too much. Perhaps this is not at all what it seems."

The Doctor frowned at her sudden concern. "Come on Hailey. Your first meeting with our people will be students. Not a bad group to meet at all."

Both Hailey and the Doctor found themselves all but surrounded by excited young people of various ages, most of them talking all at once so that none of them could be understand at all. Hailey thought she had counted sixteen or eighteen people in total, including the lady in the blue dress, who turned out to be a teacher. Now though she saw far more running, or walking quickly from their vehicle. She saw sure that now there had to be two school staff and at last thirty young students. More of the young ones hurried over to talk to the visitors too.

"Alright young people," said the blond haired lady, hurrying over herself obviously intending to spare them from the crowd of her excitement students. "We can all speak to the new arrivals of course, but please everyone, one at a time."

"Thank you," the Doctor said, as quickly the students silenced themselves and backed up a bit. "So I suppose we should introduce ourselves them. I'm the Doctor, and this is Hailey. She's sort of a student as well. My student."

"I am Matron Jenavie," the blond lady in blue replied quickly, before questioning curiously, "A student of what if I might ask?"

"Of basic Gallifreyan and Time Lord education of course," the Doctor answered, as though somehow that should have been obvious.

"Hmm," responded the school teacher calmly. "This is quite likely none of my business, as I have no right to say what happens over on the colonies, but nevertheless my personal opinion is that your daughter belongs in school."

For a moment Hailey was shocked beyond belief. Finally she found herself speaking out loud, though she was still not sure if she was supposed to or not. "Oh, I'm not his daughter. I'm just a traveling companion. He's been teaching me, because there was no one else to teach me anything..."

"I can't say I understand anything of the situation yet, so I am going to leave this issue alone for the moment," Matron Jenavie said cautiously.

"So what's the story then with you?" the Doctor inquired quickly. His natural ability to jump in a take charge of a situation showed once again in that moment. "A group of Academy students and a teacher out here on a planet occupied by primitive Tessilons."

"If I could explain all that to you, I may have had a hope of getting us out of here and back to Gallifrey an hour ago," the Time Lord schoolteacher answered. She shook her head helplessly.

"Back to Gallifrey?" the Doctor repeated in complete and utter shock. He stared at her for a long moment, wide eyed with amazement and disbelief. "Gallifrey still exists out there somewhere?"

Jenavie nodded slightly, studying the visitors with bewilderment. "Of course it does, in the same place it's always been Why wouldn't it exist?"

"Because it doesn't... or it didn't. Well it did but then it was no more..."

"Whatever are you on about?"

"There was a war," the Doctor said sadly. He had no idea whether he was right to explain this to her or not, but he'd made up his mind that he had to. He still questioned silently why she didn't know a thing about that in the first place. "A war that eventually came to involve time itself, as well as higher and lower dimensions. Because of the time element of it, it came to happen at every point in history at once. Everything was changed slowly at first and then faster and faster until there was so little good left anywhere. How can you not remember that?"

"Because such a thing never happened," Jenavie replied helplessly confused.

Hailey, standing next to her friend and following the discussion silently, looked around a bit at a small group of students, who were still standing nearby listening curiously. Several of them, she noted with concern were quite little.

"Do you two really think you should be talking about things like war at this moment?" Hailey questioned anxiously. "You're going to scare the small children."

"These young ones are not so easily scared," Jenavie said. "I can only image they are all simply as confused as I am about this war your friend speaks of." She looked to the children for a moment, obviously giving them an open invitation to voice their own thoughts.

"Doctor," said a small blue eyed girl, who must have been no more than eleven years old. "What you are speaking of as far as I understand it, sounds like the theoretical idea of what we would refer to as a time war. We've talked about such a thing in school several times. If two or more races, both with time travel capabilites went to war for any reason, we believe a time war could easily break out. That's why we strive to never become involved in affairs outside our society."

"But that's all just a hypothetical situation," a boy, a little bit older put in. "There is no one that would want to start a war with us, least of all a time war."

A much older student, who until than stood near the back of the group slightly off to the side silent and bored with the whole day, give a puzzled and surprised look of her own.

"Such a thing, as we understand it, could risk a significant part of the universe at all points in history. We are non-interferance, and so do not start wars at all. Any race capable of starting such a war with us and leaving Gallifrey no logical out but to fight, would have to be self serving enough to put an entire galaxy at risk. I just can't see that ever becoming possible."

"The Daleks," the Doctor said with both annoyance and greater confusion. "A race just self serving enough and filled with more than enough hate for all things to do such a thing. Probably the only race anywhere that's ever reached a point of being able to successfully launch an attack on the Time Lords in the first place."

Matron Jenavie's eyes grew wider with bewilderment, before she finally began to laugh a little. "You are referring to a race that was put to an end before it ever really began, back in ancient history Their are still references to them in the books but really Doctor, I have no idea what it is you are concerned about that matter for."

"Doctor, that name sounds familiar," Hailey whispered to her friend. "Isn't that the same alien race that invaded Earth at least twice?"

"Oh, more times that that," the Doctor said back.

For several long moments he thought everything over. He needed answers both for himself and Hailey and for the group from the Academy. It was clear that matron Jenavie had no idea how it was they'd landed there and he had reason to suspect something stranger than he'd first guessed was going on. After a few minutes in which he stood still, thinking intently, muttering to himself anxiously and finally looking around a few times scanning the air with his screwdriver, he loudly declared, "I think I've got it."

The students stayed nearby to keep on listening. They were all completely interested now. Some remained standing but others sat down on the grass on on a few of the large rocks that were scattered around the area. Hailey sat down on the grass herself and right away the smallest of the young ones, a girl who could not have been more than seven or eight came to sit right beside her. Hailey looked around quickly and the group and counted the students. Thirty-nine in total. That seemed a lot for just one teacher to manage. Yet it seemed that all of them, even the small ones were generally well behaved. She laughed silently to herself recalling the trouble she and her own schoolmates had given teachers back in her primary school days.

"It all has to do with inter-dimensional physics," the Doctor said to the group, trying to explain it in clear language when he himself was still nowhere close to being over the shock of the days events. "Hailey and I were finding a lot of interference with electricity and energy lately and now think I understand why. This is all related. Have any of you ever before heard anything about rifts in time and space?"

The older students, Matron Jenavie, and Hailey nodded their heads. The small children just looked confused by the new term. He went on speaking trying to go on without losing the little ones. "Okay, how about the idea of alternate or parallel universes and realities?"

When the older ones nodded again and the little ones looked at him, interested though they did not quite see what he was talking about, he went on again. He spoke fast now, excitement causing him to talk faster and faster, as he tried to make a point he was still gaining his own understanding of.

"There are so many versions of so many places. Almost everything exists in some other reality or other. Normally we can't touch or see or interact with these other realities. But the ones closest to us will have the greatest impact in smaller ways we generally don't even notice. Think of it like city blocks! If a sound was loud enough you could hear it a block from where you were standing, maybe even work out what's happened over there. But think about what you might hear if the sound was five or six blocks away. Just about anything would go completely unheard by you, where you're standing."

"But what does any of that have to do with anything?" asked the same older student who had spoken earlier. "All you've done is state the obvious."

"Oh just a quick lesson in dimensional physics theory for the little guys mostly," the Doctor said, before he went back his explanation. "Anyway, all that said, we also know that under most circumstances the many universes remain closed off from each other. Between each one there is nothing at all. Just blackness and silence, no night, day, up, down. We call that the void. This void though, can be bypassed however on a journey between universes, by using the rifts I mentioned before. Now... think for a second. What if it was possible to cross over from one to another using a rift, and never realizing or knowing it?"

"Are you actually saying we might have done that?" asked one of the students somewhere between the older and young ones in age. He looked impressed at the very thought it such a thing.

"Don't be ridiculous, Hani," said the girl who'd just questioned point of the physics lesson.

"He's not being ridiculous at all. He's very right. And I'd advise you to pay attention if you want to stay on top of the game," the Doctor said cheerfully and filled with hyperactive energy. He reached over the small group and tapped the young Time Lord girl right on the tip of her nose with his finger. "Universes may not effect each other, but surely we would still be aware of them. Our people are sensitive to time and dimensional stability or instability," the bold student said. She got to her feet and stared the visitor in the face. "Even if we did fall right through a rift, across the void and landed here of all places, there's still something missing."

"Go on."

"You're implying that we just all of a sudden landed in some crazy and strange universe where Gallifrey no longer exists. If some other version of our own planet was completely destroyed, we'd know."

"Not necessarily," the Doctor answered. "Remember the analogy of the city blocks? Well it's not as though your version of the planet and mine were a block away from each other. I think it might be something like forty or fifty blocks. From that distance you'll hear nothing at all in any way."

"One or two universes from each other and it's possible to travel across them," Matron Jenavie put in. "But it seems you're talking about us having traveled across a very large handful of them in an instant. I would tend to think such a thing would tear the fabric of time nearly to pieces."

"No. Not if the rift created a nice clear path right across, which it obviously did."

Matron Jenavie, who until then had been standing at the back of her group of students, made her way forward slowly. She gently took hold of the Doctor's arm and made a move to lead him away, indicating a need for private discussion. He walked with her several meters from the gathered group. They leaned against the bus and she looked around to make sure no one was listening in.

"Doctor," she said then in helplessness. "I'm a language arts instructor and a school matron. I know little of engineering. I only understand how to operate the bus, not fix it. My knowledge of the rifts and parallel universes is about as good as that of most of the older students, if I'm lucky. I don't wish to sound like a ridiculous panicking mess here, but how exactly are we going to get back?"


	8. Chapter 8

The Doctor hurried about, waving his screwdriver through the air, turning and doing it again. He tried facing in several directions, holding it up high over his head and waving it closer to the ground. He backed backward for a few paces without bothering to look behind him to see where he was going, and nearly tripped over a rock in the middle of the area in which he was working. He quickly caught himself, and after stumbling for a second trying not to lose his balance again, he continued on with little thought.

"This planet's native race is still primitive," he said quickly. "But as far as Hailey and I have seen and learned, they seem to already be developing time sensitivity. This planet seems to be conducive to it. Sort of like Gallifrey, only there's no reason to think this race, the Tessilons, will ever get to be quite what we are. This is all starting to make sense though. Your bus came through the rift and of course it needed to be drawn somewhere. It should have been pulled right toward this universes version of our own planet, but that planet does not exist in this universe. So it was drawn here because of the time energy on this planet. It may not be anything like that of our own world, but close enough!"

"Is that all good news so far then?" Jenavie asked. She looked nervous. Of course it was perfectly reasonable that she would be concerned not so much for herself as for the group of students she was responsible for getting back safely.

"It's definitely good news. The exposure to the time energy on this planet won't hurt the Tessilons any more than it did to us on our own planet. And as for the bus and getting it back, that shouldn't be as tricky as you might think." He stopped waving the screwdriver around losing enough to have a short serious discussion. Promptly however he started again, waving it in the air over his head and down near his feet.

"Doctor!" Jenavie said. She sounded both nervous and puzzled as well as slightly annoyed. "What are you doing?"

"Looking for the direction best in line with the rift. Think of it like trying to find satellite reception for a television or a computer. Best to have everything facing the right way or it will just be fuzzy." The Doctor spun around once again his his quick circle and paused suddenly. "And... got it! Find a stick or something to mark this direction and place it down so it points the way I'm pointing now."

The schoolteacher looked around and quickly located a small twig laying on the ground nearby. Still confused, concerned and unsure what to think she nevertheless placed it into the position she'd been asked to.

"Thank you," the Doctor said. "That'll do fine." He ran a few steps as though he wanted to do something and then very suddenly stopped and stood looking at her.

"Your bus does have an emergency antenna I assume?" he said then.

Jenavie nodded slowly. "Of course. Stored underneath at the back."

Within an hour the Doctor, with a fair bit of help from Hailey and couple of the oldest students, had the large and complicated retractable antenna, it's receiver and the transmitter, out from under the bus. In the the process, they'd had no choice but to also drag out a spare tire, a large box containing a couple of spare fuel rods for the time drive, a heavy duty jack and an impossibly heavy toolbox, that Hailey observed only half humorously must have bigger on the inside. The two young men that had helped them retrieve the equipment insisted they had a general idea of how to use it as well, and so they climbed up into the roof of the bus to help assemble the system.

Hailey stood on the ground watching and feeling useless, unable to do a thing that would be of any help at all. The same very small girl stood beside her happy to watch her older school peers and the other of the visitors work with the antenna. Many of the other students began to chat amongst themselves, in low tones, respectful of everyone else. That small girl though didn't say a word to anyone. After several moments of standing still and simply observing, the small child wandered slowly away into the crowd. A moment later Hailey walked away herself and went off to stand alone near a couple of tall trees at the edge of the meadow.

"Hello," a voice right behind her made her nearly jump with fright.

Hailey turned around quickly and found herself face to face with that same older student who'd boldly questioned the Doctor. She looked at her closer and saw that this student was roughly her own age, and perhaps even older than that. The student's brown hair was pinned back behind her ears with a couple of hairpins, and she was wearing a bit of eyeliner. Form whatever reason, Hailey was surprised to notice such thing. She would have assumed that make-up would have been forbidden.

"Didn't mean to scare you," the student apologized. "You always that easily startled?"

"No. It's just been that kind of overwhelming day I think," Hailey muttered back.

"You're friend's a bit odd," the student said next. She frowned a bit and shook her head very slightly. "Certainly well into middle age or even past that. Yet it seems he's _trying _to behave like a child deliberately."

"I suppose you're right," Hailey answered. She leaned against the tree behind her. "But then, you don't know him as well as I do. No one does. The Doctor has saved the world so many times... well so many worlds actually. Just traveling wherever it is we end up and just jumping in taking charge and setting right the wrongs."

"But you are Time Lords. Why would you want to interfere like that, in everything you can?"

Hailey's only answer was a small shrug of her shoulders and a shake of her head, to indicate that she didn't really know about such things in the same way as others, instead of struggling to explain herself any further she changed the subject.

"That very little girl with this group somewhere, do you know her?"

"Very little girl?"

"Yeah. The youngest of the students out here. The little blond haired child."

"Oh, you must mean Lyna-Melie."

"Can she speak?" Hailey asked. She'd grown concerned enough to ask after seeing her silent the whole time she'd been there.

The older student laughed a little. "Of course she can talk. Why couldn't she? She's just very quiet is all. Not that I really know her very well myself. She's a second year and I'm a nineteenth. I did hear her say something on the bus earlier though."

"So, do you think it's all true. About the parallel dimension I mean?" the student asked after a minute. "I'm still not sure what to make of that hyperactive friend of your's and his understanding of advanced physics."

"It's all true," Hailey said with confidence. "He said that's what happened so I believe that's exactly what did happen. Anyway, it's the only thing that really makes any sense at all, even if that doesn't make complete sense either. I'm just going to stand back and let the Doctor figure all this out, just like I always do. His understanding of science is completely amazing. I get so lost sometimes jut trying to work it all out."

"So what kind of name is Hailey anyway?" the student asked. "Not a Gallifreyan name at all. At least not that I've ever heard."

"Hailey is an Earth name."

"Earth? Sounds like that must be a another planet. But why would you have a name from Earth. It's not even a place most people have heard of."

"My mother was human, a person from Earth," Hailey answered. She had no idea what the student, let alone the others as soon as word went around the group, might make of that information. But she didn't concern herself with it. Now that the subject had come up, there was no way she was going to simple deny the word she was raised on. And she would certainly never deny her own mother.

"That's... very interesting," the student said. For a couple of brief fractions of a second Hailey was worried she'd laugh, or even react in fear which would have been far worse. But she saw that the young lady was smiling, with a look of understanding on her face. "That explains a lot actually. You seem like us, but different too. A few of us were talking about that a few minutes ago, not to be rude or gossipy, but because we were all a bit baffled by the sense you gave us. It makes sense that you are something slightly different." She jumped up to sit on the lowest branch of the tree behind her.

"So where were all of you going or coming from before you ended up here?" Hailey asked, curious.

"We were the group chosen to meet with a student group from one of our planet's colonies. Some of the colonies have formed their own schools. Us and those groups would never interact with each other at all, if not for a few trips a year by randomly chosen students."

"That sounds much better," Hailey said. "That they keep their children closer to home, I mean."

The student looked at her for a second, puzzled. "Why would it make any difference how far from home the children are?"

"Because small children should be with their parents. I find it odd enough that our people send seven year olds to live away from home for the sake of education. But sending them to another planet would be a bit much wouldn't it? You only left for another part of your own world and I'd imagine even that would have been sad."

The student stared ahead, off into space. She had a daydreaming expression on her face, as she thought back to her early childhood years. "I was looking for forward to going off to school. Since about age four or five I looked forward to leaving to live at the Academy. Both of my parents are senators. Even back then they were working and working. I saw them literally once ever couple of weeks and often only one of them at a time. My only sibling is A hundred and twenty-two years older than I am. She's always had her own life the entire time I've existed. To this this day I've only seen her maybe twenty times."

"Sounds so lonely."

"It was. Until I was old enough to be shipped off to school, I was raised by my mother's hired help. There were no other children to play with. I barely knew my own parents. My father came home one day and told me I would be leaving for school in a short while and I saw it only as a chance to have other children to make friends with. I was happy about not being lonely anymore." The student laughed, before she added, "I had my bags packed weeks before I was to leave."

The boy called Hani, who had earlier caught on to the idea of the dimensional rift, ran over to where the two young women were conversing away from the rest of the group.

"Hailey, Maralee," he called to them both. "I've been looking around for you two.

They've got the antenna up. The Doctor said to gather the troops. His exact words. I assume he must mean to find everyone."

"Come on then," Hailey said to the girl on the branch of the tree. "You'll be home by this evening!"

"Are you really sure this is all going to work?" Maralee questioned, mildly doubtful.

"Not everyone has ever been able to just jump through dimensions easily," Hani put in, as the three began to make their way back toward the bus. "The specialists can do it, but they've devoted their lives to understanding everything there is to know about such things."

"The Doctor will be able to do it," Hailey answered boldly. "He can do anything."

"Does the bus run at all?" the Doctor was asking Matron Jenavie as the three young people ran over to join the group.

"Yes. Well sort of. It starts and it moves, but the time drives are shot completely."

"We don't need the time drives. I can tow it with my own vehicle. We just need the bus to run well enough to make it back to pick it up."

"Easily done. Just give me directions."

Matron Jenavie stood aside and motioned for the students to board the bus. The group ran around all over the place, some picking up backpacks from off the ground and others looking for classmates they wished to sit with. One small boy kneeled down to pick up a dropped computer disk and was distracted for a moment with rearranging the contents of his pack. A girl bent down to tie one of her shoelaces and then decided to double check to be sure the other was tied too.

The Doctor hurried away for the side of the bus to help the schoolteacher gather up her group. Wandering several meters away, closer to the edge of the woods he found Hani standing still and looking worries, with his hands in the pockets of his black jacket and eyes down toward the ground. He approached the boy in concern.

"What's the matter?" he questioned quickly. "Quick, go jump on the bus. We're getting out of here."

"I've lost my data storage unit," Hani said sadly. He looked helplessly. "A couple other boys and I decided to go across the clearing and into the woods not long after we landed. We weren't supposed to wander too far away but we did anyway."

"Was it your school issue unit you lost then?"

"Yes it was. We were busy exploring a bit in the over on the other side there. Found a path up a hill and we could hear the river flowing. We wanted to go see the water, but we thought we heard someone calling us to come back. We ran back so fast with our packs on. Mine was unzipped, and I just noticed my storage fell out."

Hani sounded like any other concerned and greatly over reacting child of most any intelligent and advanced race, as he continued on by muttering out loud, "I'm going to end up in so much trouble over this one. I've got two essays in there due in two days and drafts for my science project. Everything is stored in there, and it's school equipment!"

The Doctor quickly looked through his own little pack and pulled out the small piece of equipment he'd discovered earlier that morning in the woods. He held it up, grinning triumphantly.

"Is this it?"

The boy looked at him with disbelieving relief. He grinned. "That's it!"

The Doctor handed the device back. "I won't say anything if you won't."

"Thank you!" Hani carefully put his equipment into his backpack. This time he made a point of zipping it up after.

"Hey let's just call it even," the Doctor said, speaking quietly as the two of them walked slowly back toward the bus. "You never knew it, but you actually did Hailey and I a huge favor by dropping it. We solved a big piece of a bigger puzzle by finding that."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"On board the bus everyone," Matron Jenavie cried firmly. She looked around again at a small group of students, mostly the smallest ones, that still dawdled in the clearing gathering their things a little too slowly. "Hurry. We need to get a move on."

"Got the last one," the Doctor said as he and Hani hurried over to the rest.

"On you get," Jenavie said. She gently pushed Hani, the Doctor and finally Hailey forward on the bus, before finally stepping on herself.

"Hailey, she said quickly as she got behind the controls. "Could you count them all please?"

"Thirty-nine students, " Hailey said after quickly counting the group, starting at th back and working her way forward and then doing it all again just to be sure. "You, me, and the Doctor brings the total to forty-two people.

"Forty-two? Perfect. Everyone's here... ready... Hailey find a seat... and we're off."

Hailey looked around quickly before finding the seat the Doctor had saved her, almost right at the front of the bus. She sat down quickly as the engine started with a loud shrieking squeal. The vehicle vibrated hard for at first and for a second many of other passengers on board held their breath fearing it may not go anywhere at all. After that first moment of hesitation though the engine began to hum quietly. The vehicle rolled forward a couple meters.

"I can't believe it," Hailey said with excitement. "A Time Lord Academy school bus. Amazing how I can suddenly be so curious bout little details like this, when until today I'd never thought of such a thing at all."

She turned a bit in her seat to see her friend leaning a bit, with his head resting almost the inside wall, where on a bus on Earth, a window would be. "You okay?"

"It was several seconds until the Doctor looked back at her and answered, clearly distracted. "Yeah. Yeah, fine. I just... During all that running around and trying to help this group it was easy to get caught up in it all. But now with nothing to do, I find this all a bit overwhelming."

"Me to. It's one thing to accept you are part of a race that once existed uty no longer does, and quite another to actually get to meet them when you thought for sure it was impossible."

"There weren't supposed to be any Time Lords left anywhere. Just us, and of course even you were unexpected. Your father was brilliant to hide you on Earth. You survived and no one ever knew about it. Not even me at first. Years though I spent running from one place to another. I looked for survivors sometimes at first, but after a few years I gave up. There was no one out there and I came to accept that I was alone. Now we find a whole successful Time Lord civilization from other universe, that knows nothing about the war at all."

"It's just shocking isn't it? But how did you miss this possibility? You said you looked for others, but did you ever think of looking in other universes."

"That's a complicated thing," the Doctor said simply. "Yes and no. A bit yes, but mostly no."

"Doctor," Hailey said in sudden concern. A new thought had occurred to her and she looked around a bit to see outside, forgetting there were no windows on the bus. " Matraxian Jarvo doesn't have roads. The Tessilons haven't reached that point yet in this time period. How are we going to get anywhere?"

"You've missed everything, growing up on Earth," the Doctor laughed. "Only one of those clunky old human designed vehicles would get stuck out here without a road."

"So this one must have some kind of off ground or hovercraft mode then?"

"Of course it does. And the TARDIS doesn't drive on the ground either. This is hardly a new concept."

"So why does the bus have wheels?" Hailey asked. She meant her question with a slight bit of humor, but was also quite serious at the same time.

"Because some planets do have roads it can drive on," the Doctor answered simply.

Hailey couldn't see out outside, so instead she took a moment to look around inside the vehicle. It certainly had a few things in common with an Earth bus, but so much that was different and completely foreign too . The interior walls were the same shade or muted grey as the outside, and the seats and carpeting on the floor were a couple shades of dark blue. The lack of windows made it look so much different than she'd ever seen on Earth and a row of bright yet soft lighting panels mounted on the ceiling gave off a nice even glow.

The students filled many, but not quite all of the seats. Most of them sat quietly socializing with each other, or with small computerized notepads open on their laps, reading or writing in them with some kind of ink-less pens. Near the back an older student was quite obvious helping two young ones with some work on their little computers. In front of those three, Hani and another boy about his age were engaged in a intent conversation and getting louder about it. For a second or two it became clear to everyone on board that they were arguing about the possible design for some sort of propulsion system. Quickly they caught themselves and quieted their voices again.

She turned back to the front of the bus and only then noticed Lyna-Melie in the seat right behind the one across from her own. The child was such a tiny little thing, and in the seat all by herself, it was no wonder at all she'd gone unnoticed. She was busy writing in her own little pad, looking down intently at her work. Hailey looked for a moment at the small child sadly. She was only eight years old and already slightly into her second years away from her family. She knew she could hardly judge the system of sending away children a harsh. She had no right to judge a society she had grown up outside of. Yet still , she could barely shake the feeling of injustice, when she looked again at the time child sitting alone on a bus. Hailey wondered then if the child was loved by a family somewhere on their planet, or if her situation was more like that of Maralee, whose own parents might not have even missed her.

The girl was eight years old, Hailey remembered learning earlier, and she was near the start of her second year. Her initiation year, she realized then. Somehow she was saddened by that understanding. Lyna-Melie, though perfectly silent and sitting alone when her school mates were sitting with one another and busily chatting, looked happy enough. She wrote in her electronic notebook, holding the pen between chubby little fingers. Her feet, not nearly able to touch the floor while she sat in her seat swung back and forth carelessly. One lightly tapped the back of the seat in front of her repeatedly as she considered carefully what exactly to write.

Hailey leaned over a little and said slowly, "What are you working on there?"

"Mathematics equations," the little girl replied quietly.

"How's that going?"

"Good. But I have one that I know is wrong but I don't know how to fix it."

"So numbers then? Hmm... I can't say I know the Gallifreyan number system very well at all, so I think you're ahead of me there."

The child smiled, laughing a little. She promptly went back to her schoolwork.

~DW~DW~DW~

Hailey paused at the door of the TARDIS and looked around for a moment before closing the door behind her. They were right back where they had started days before. She recognized the place where the little group of Tessilon young had played. She was saddened by the memory of the galactic patrol agent holding a fuzzy little pink girl by her feet while she struggled to free herself by hitting him with a small stick.

She hoped she might see a few of the Tessilons again. Her heart was set on saying a proper goodbye to the race that had turned out to be so much more than she had ever imagined. But there were none in sight. She'd really wanted to see those little ones again, but of course she understood that the adults were quite logically more careful about letting their children play in that place, after the attack on the child recently.

The large metallic grey bus with the clearly entirely alien writing on the sides of it, looked strangely more out of place here than it had in the first place it had been parked. Hailey stood for a moment looked back at the bus to see if anyone else would follow them outside. She was prepared to help round up the young students again, but no one came out at all.

"Come on Hailey," the Doctor said from his place, already inside and near the controls of his ship. ""And be sure to lock the door behind you. No use risking the door flying open in the middle of a dimensional rift.

Hailey shut the door tightly and locked it. "Can that happen?"

"I have no idea. No use taking that chance, in case it can."

"So, what do we do now?"

At his companion's simple question, the Doctor launched into a quick and simplified explanation of the plan as it currently stood. "The emergency antenna we put on the top of the bus, I've set it up to send a signal to it's home base, and then to follow that same signal back to itself. That loop of sending and tracking it back again should create a stable link between the bus and Gallifrey. Well the alternate universe version of it. Think of it like an energetic pulley system. Basically we and the the bus and everyone on it gets pulled right through the rift and straight to it's home planet."

"So what does that have to do with us? What do we need the TARDIS for?"

"The bus has no time drives and it's still very much out of it's time period. It also can't dematerialize into the vortex, which it would have to in order to travel through the dimensional rift safely. Even with the antenna and the feedback loop acting as a pulley, we still need to tow it behind us for it to get anywhere. My ship can also boost the signal. We need it to be as powerful as possible. Actually even your ship can be of some help, even though it's in inactive storage mode downstairs."

The Doctor was carrying a small device that looked a bit like a television remote control in his hand. He pushed a couple of buttons on it, and checked the monitor on board the ship.

"What is that?" Hailey asked. She stood in the middle of the room, looking at the monitor herself but not understanding exactly what it was she was seeing anyway. For the most part it was just alternating patterns of swirling and wavy lines. Every few seconds she would see quick flashes of Gallifreyan language characters, but she was not good enough yet to read anything that fast.

"The portable external control for the emergency antenna," the Doctor replied. "I need to keep an eye on the monitor and keep control of the signal. I need for you to fly the ship yourself."

"You want me to fly your ship?"

"Sure. You can fly your own just fine, and you learned in this one."

"Doctor, you're asking me to fly a time ship into a whole new universe," Hailey said, beginning to panic. "I don't think I can do that. I've never done anything like that before."

"I've only done it once, and that was completely by accident," the Doctor answered. He tapped a hand on the console a couple of times. "This old ship has a mind of her own sometimes. I still have no idea what it was she was trying to do. Anyway that aside, we learn by doing. How else do you learn anything at all?"

"Umm..."

"These people need to get home as soon as possible. Prepare to launch."

Hailey had her share of doubts about so many things, but nevertheless she reached over the console to push a green button that would release the brakes. "Ready to launch."

"Take us straight into the vortex. I've set everything to work together. The ship will just track the signal by itself now."

"What about the bus?"

"The connection is established and holding. Go. The bus will follow."

Hailey stood watching the gage in front of her. The years raced forward with great speed as the time vortex dragged the ship forward. Next to the time gage, the vortex mini-map showed the TARDIS as the same small blue cube it always showed while in flight. This time though a slightly bigger red shape trailed behind it. She was convinced that the bus was still following like it was meant to.

"Hailey, there's something I need to talk to you about,' the Doctor said once the ship was flying at a good and steady pace and she could safely take most of her attention from the controls. She turned around slowly, leaned lightly against the console and looked at him. "Sure. What's up?"

"Earlier you told one of the Gallifreyan students you thought I could do anything," the Doctor said. He spoke slowly and quietly, looking down at the floor, up at her and right back down at the floor again. He was choosing his words carefully.

Hailey looked at him for a second and then shrugged. "Yeah. So?"

"Why'd you try to convince someone so unlikely and absurd?"

"It's not absurd at all though. I think you can do anything."

The Doctor stared right at him with determination, sadness, and doubt all at once. "No I can't. I really can't do anything and everything. So many people over the years have somehow become so easily convinced that I can save everyone and fix anything at all, without fail, no matter how impossible the odds. But Hailey, the fact is I make so many mistakes. I miss so much until it's almost too late. People have been hurt so many times just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can't always protect everyone. People have died and been lost, and given up hope. There is just so much I can't do, even when nieve young companions think for some crazy reason that I can."

Hailey was about to reply. She had no idea what to say exactly, but still she was about to say something anyway, improvising as she went along. The sudden horrible rocking of the ship, from one side to the other, distracted her from struggling with awkward words.

Her attention went fully back to the console and the monitors. As the ship rocked again, this time bouncing and shaking in the same moment, she grabbed hold of the front of the console and held on tightly with one hand. The sickening motion didn't stop. In fact it only seemed to get worse. Hailey looked around in wide eyed panic, her free hand straggling to find the stabilizer switch. She wasn't certain that would even work at all to get a handle on the ship's erratic motion, but she had to try something or other fast. Her eyes went for a second to the monitor and they grew wider with fright.

"Doctor!" she cried, still searching in panic for the switch. She felt as though she was falling downward endlessly in a too fast moving elevator. "We've lost the time vortex!"

"Yeah,' the Doctor said, with surprising calm. "That seems to happen. Don't worry. The TARDIS will find it again on the other side of the rift."

Hailey was reminded a little too much of her still very recent crash in her own ship, onto a desert planet. Her sense of panic increased greatly as she tried without much success at all to shake the feeling that there was about to be another serious accident. She forced back her fright and panic and finally her hand found the stabilizer switch. It did a little good, but not as much as she'd hoped. The monitor, when she dared to turn her head to the side again long enough to look at it, told her the ship was still moving forward but slowing down rapidly.

"We need more speed," she said urgently. Even with all the shaking and rattling and the fright and panic it caused, she realized that if they lost power and came to a stop now, they would have no way to get any lift and find a way to move easily again. The last thing they needed was to stall now and she knew it. "Doctor, we're still slowing down."

The Doctor, standing in the middle of the room with the control for the antenna still in his hand glanced her the monitors quickly. "Yeah. We're going to end up stalling out. See that little green button directly in front of you? The secondary accelerator?"

"Yes."

"Press it, and hold it as far down as you can."

Hailey pushed her hand down onto the green button as hard and quickly as she could. On the monitor she saw that much to her relief they were quickly picking up speed again. The shaking was beginning to stop as well, or maybe she was just growing used to the motion and was not so frightened by it. She turned to the Doctor, daring to laugh a little, still holding her hand on the accelerator button. "So, basically the time ship equivalent to flooring it in a car then?"

"Basically. Yeah, something like that."

"Hey Doctor?"

"Yes?"

"I'm seeing the vortex on the monitor again. The TARDIS found it again, like you said it would."

"Okay enter coordinates 957-9832-3862," the Doctor said. He read the numbers carefully from a scrap of paper he'd taken from his jacket pocket.

Hailey quickly began to type the sequence of numbers into the computer. Unsure of the last four and needing to be certain she turned to the Doctor for a second and repeated, "3862?"

"Right. And after you set our coordinates, you'll need to set the ship to relocate as well. We're in the right time now but still the wrong place."

"Are we really in another universe now then?"

"Yes."

"Amazing." Hailey checked the monitor again, concerned for obvious reasons. Too her relief though the bus still appeared to be following the TARDIS. She was used to the best made plans coming unraveled. She'd come to expect that when she traveled with the Doctor, things would so often go wrong in ways neither of them could have seen coming in time to stop them. She'd grown so used to thinking fast and so used to listening carefully, even if she did eventually choose not to follow exact instructions. This time though, a plan was going exactly right. It was not often that seemed to happen. For a second she laughed to herself at that fact.

After the ship and the bus that trailed behind it had rematerialized once again in a new part of this new universe, Hailey's attention went right back to the monitor. It was fuzzy at first and buzzing with static and hazy rolling lines. She gave it a good whack with the palm of her right hand. That was enough to get it working again.

The monitor, mounted above the console, displayed the real time image of a bluish white star, distant enough it looked so small but close enough she could see the aura of light surrounding and beaming out from it. Further away she saw the second star, exactly where she knew it should have been, a fair distance from the first. This one was shining with yellow and orange hues. It reminded her of Earth's own sun. Much closer to the monitor, and somewhat between the two suns, she saw a planet much bigger than the Earth. From the sky from far above, the orangy color of most of the layers of it's atmosphere, and very red color of the landscape far below made it look somewhat like a planet on fire. Other smaller worlds sat off in the distance. There was a whole solar system before her.

Hailey stood still, her hands posed without moving near the controls, as she started at the image on the monitor. She watched as the blazing red planet appeared to get closer and closer. After several more seconds she turned back to the Doctor, who was watching the monitor himself with his own shocked expression on his face.

"Doctor, we made it," Hailey cried in shock and amazement . "This is it. The planet of the Time Lords!"

**A/N; A couple of notes on this one. Firstly, yes I suppose the idea of a bus that can obviously fly is a bit reminiscent of 'The Planet of the Dead.' But I thought all along it was different enough to be reasonable as a new plot device. This is a Gallifreyan school bus. I think it's perfectly easy to imagine the Time Lords would build buses for their school, that are capable of traveling in the air when there are no roads available. **

** Also, I'm looking for some input on whether the Tessilons should have further involvement in this story. Those little pink characters started put simply as a passing situation but of course they seemed to develop into something quite interesting. I might like to use them again later on. There's some potential there for sure. **

** Anyway, as always reviews are most welcome. :) **


	9. Chapter 9

The TARDIS made a smooth gentle landing as soon as it had reached the point of the antenna's homing signal. Hailey immediately set to powering it down as the Doctor released the bus from it's makeshift energetic tow rope with the push of a few buttons. The humming and wheezing of the engine stopped and all sense of motion turned to complete stillness. Both of them stood for a moment saying and doing nothing. The Doctor checked the monitor again, after switching it back on in power down mode.

"So now what?" Hailey questioned. She stepped toward the door and stood expectantly, holding a hand out to her friend. "We gonna go check this place out then?"

"Now we basically turn around and fly right back to where we started," the Doctor replied. "Well give or take a couple of star systems. No reason to go back to the place we just came from. Let's go to Earth for a while. I think London has a film festival in 2014 that's..."

"Doctor!" Hailey cried, staring at him in disbelief. "We've actually made it to your home planet. The home world of my own lost people. All these years you've missed it and all this time I've wondered what it was really like. And now you just want to go back without even stepping outside."

The Doctor looked for a moment down at his feet, not moving. "Yes. I do."

"Why?" Hailey could not hide her excitement... or her rapidly growing disappointment. "Havn't you always wanted to see it again, even just one more time. And I've never got to see Gallifrey at all."

The Doctor took a few quick steps to stand closer to her again. "Hailey. This is not our Gallifrey. This is an alterate universe version of it. What it could have been if the time war had never happened. It's not home. It's only what might have been for us if so many things had been different."

Hailey looked at him with her bright eyes wide open. Quietly, with a voice of understanding and curiosity and confidence she said, "I know. Still though aren't you even the least bit curious?"

"Of course I am," the Doctor admitted. His expression was still filled with seriousness but slowly he began to grin as he looked toward the door.

"Please?" Hailey dared to ask then. She knew him more than well enough to know he would surely give in any second.

The Doctor looked at his companion, and then at the door and right back at his companion again. He laughed slightly with amusement, and took a small step toward the door.

"I'd have to be crazy to think I could bring you this close to the home you've never seen and then just expect you to happily turn back without even just a little peek," he said shaking his head a little.

Hailey looked at him with growing expectation. "So, can we go outside?"

The Doctor grinned like a five year old, who had found himself doing something he knew better than to do, but choosing to do it anyway. He took a couple more steps forward and moved to pull open the door. "Okay. A little look around wouldn't hurt."

As soon as they stepped outside, the two of them found themselves in a courtyard of soft grass. The Doctor took a few confidant steps forward, but Hailey took only one tiny one, and then stepped back into the ship again. She stood looking down at the lawn. The grass was obviously well kept up. Recently cut, and not a weed to be seen. But the grass was also quite a bright shade of red. She'd known it would be of course. She'd even painted the rough idea of a red landscape from subconscious knowledge before she knew what it was she was doing. Yet to actually see such a thing up close and all completely real was quite another thing entirely. After a moment's pause she convinced herself it was only grass, and perfectly harmless at that. She took a few steps to catch up to the Doctor.

To her left there stood a tall tree that she thought looked a lot like an oak tree she might see back on Earth - except that this tree's leaves appeared silvery instead of green. She could almost have been convinced that the tree was made of metal but a light breeze gently shook the branches and the sound was just like that of any other tree, instead of a metallic chiming she may have almost expected. Above her the sky looked just as orange as it had from far above the surface.

"It's just like you always said," Hailey exclaimed. Running up to the Doctor, she grabbed hold of one of his hands and pulled him forward a few steps in her excitement. "Everything looks so different from any place I've ever seen. The colors are so strange. How could life here have evolved to look exactly like humans when everything looks so different?"

"I can't say I've ever considered that before," the Doctor said, her excitement impressing him more than just the thought of being home himself. "Why is it always you who manages to think of asking the impossible questions?"

"Because technically I'd be considered a borderline genius, by Earth standards," Hailey said, with both complete seriousness and humor in her vice. She looked at him, shrugging her shoulders innocently. It was less than a second before she was distracted again, this time after looking up.

"The sky is orange," she cried "This is so amazing. Utterly and completely incredible."

For several moments she ran around within a the few meters on each side of her friend, still too uncertain to wander much further but wanting to explore and touch everything, and convince herself it was real. The Doctor stayed where he was, but found himself leaning down for a moment to touch the grass. The two of them eventually stood together again on the courtyard lawn. For many long minutes neither said anything at all. Hailey looked around again slowly, this time noticing the man made structures around her instead of becoming so excited again by the strange natural colors of the planet.

On her left, behind that tree she'd first seen there was high fence made of large grey bricks, that surrounded the area for as far as she could see. She looked to the right and for the first time she noticed an enormous multi-story building. It was constructed in a building style made up of an unusual combination of grey brickwork, barely translucent glass, and curving rust colored metal beams. To one side of it stood another building, similar in style but considerably smaller. A cement walkway made its way along the inside of the fence, and branched off to wind it's way between the buildings. Here and there sat a few quite beautiful benches made of wood and stone, placed in groups of four facing each other in tight circles.

"Doctor, where exactly are we now?" Hailey asked.

"The Academy campus," the Doctor replied. He took a few steps forward and his companion followed quickly.

"So the whole school is really made up of several separate buildings then? Strangely I'd always just pictured everything in one big school building."

The Doctor stopped again and stood on the grass facing the smaller of the two nearest structures. He pointed toward it slowly.

"That's one of the student dormitory buildings," he said. "If everything here is the same as our own universe then that one should house the oldest female students."

He looked then toward the largest of the buildings. "That one's the main school building. There should be two more small educational buildings we can't see from here, as well as a few more housing buildings, the administration offices, and other boring stuff like that."

"Where'd that group of students go anyway?"

"I'd imagine the matron sent the big ones off their own separate ways to get to wherever they needed to be, and took the little ones to their own housing area."

"Doctor, are we supposed to be in here at all?" Hailey asked, suddenly nervous at the thought of being on what may well have been considered private property.

"As far as I know, no one really cares about that sort of thing. It's not like the schools on Earth. All the nervousness about strangers on school grounds and all that."

"Doctor, Hailey, you're still around then. Thank goodness I caught up to you again," Matron Jenavie called, hurrying up behind them before they'd even seen her return.

"I wanted to thank you properly for all your help," she said, coming to stand with the two of them on the lawn. "If the two of you hadn't come along I still haven't a clue what I ever would have done. I've decided to go to the senate tomorrow evening when they hold their next open floor meeting. There's been no end of trouble with that bus for a year on end now and no one's done a thing about it. I'm going right to the top about this. One of the students could have easily been injured or worse today because of the school's refusal to provide us a new new bus."

"Faulty vehicles can be no end of trouble, and also dangerous," Hailey said trying to offer her support through agreement. "And when that vehicle also happens to travel through time and space, I can see how the problem could be even worse."

"Faulty vehicle indeed," Jenavie grumbled in frustration. "It's never done anything quite like this before thankfully. If it had ever done so before I'd have refused to take it out today. Most often it just won't start or it threatens to overheat. I've told them though. I've told those school administrators over and over again that the bus was going to break down one day. But

I'm just a school matron and a teacher at barely a level worth noticing. They just don't care what I have to say about the bus or much else."

"We were happy to help today of course," the Doctor replied. He laughed to himself a bit "And good luck with the senate. Gallifrey it seems is exactly as I remember it. So many people so sure of themselves and set in their ways that no one ever gets anything done in any hurry at all. Are they all still just basically looking to each other constantly to solve something or other, and wondering why no one else did a thing about anything?"

Jenavie gave a brief and quiet laugh. She stood near the two of them, looking from one to the other. "That sums it up so perfectly."

A lady in a blue dress exactly like Jenavie's rounded a corner, walking on the path. This one was taller and had dark hair and a considerably dark skin tone. She was carrying a small stack of paper documents under one arm and a electronic device which could only have been a laptop computer, in the opposite hand. She hurried her pace toward the three people already gathered on the grass near the main school building.

"Jenavie," she said in a matter of fact tone, as she came to stand with the little group herself. "These must be the two you mentioned upstairs. The two that came to the aid of you and the stranded students today."

"Hailey Andrews and the Doctor," Jenavie said, making polite introductions. "This is Matron Arah."

"Hello," Hailey said politely.

"Good to meet you," the Doctor muttered with far less enthusiasm.

"I spoke with a few other school staff members as soon as Jenavie finished telling me about the incident on Martaxian Jarvo," Matron Arah said quickly. "Of course the whole staff is talking about it now, and you know young people. The students are already speaking excitedly with one another about multi-dimensional physics, all because someone mentioned an encounter with an alternate reality. This evening is sure to be exciting at the school."

"Come in for a while and talk with the staff. You may even meet a few more students," Jenavie offered happily.

"I don't think that's a very good idea," the Doctor protested, and he completely meant it.

The two ladies from the school staff offered their adamant insistence that everyone was anxious to meet them. Finally the two adventures found themselves pulled quickly toward the school building by two very excited young women.

The evening was spent not at all unpleasantly, visiting with a large group of teachers and administrators, with various students of various ages rushing about from time to time and asking questions. Staff and students alike had so much they wished to know, and Time Lord children, just like the children of most every other known race in the universe, were exceedingly curious about things they did not fully understand. The visitors were offered rooms for the night in a mostly unused part of the administrators housing area. They declined, insisting they could and would prefer to stay in their own rooms on board the Doctor's ship. Finally however, after several of the staff had tried hard to convince them to stay, they accepted the offer. Two considerably small children were asked to show them to a pair of rooms, which turned out to be located in the lowest level of a building far across the campus.

The sun that had been shining in the sky when the travelers arrived, the orangey colored one, had set sometime while they were inside. Instead of the sky being left in darkness though, the silver-white sun had risen at other side of the horizon. It was well into the evening now and still, because of the second sun, nearly as bright outside as it had been in mid afternoon. The four of them - Hailey and the Doctor, along with the two little students - made their way quickly across along the walking path, around a tight bend, and past a little grove of trees. They made their way toward a few buildings Hailey was of course seeing for the first time.

"Is it always daylight here?" Hailey asked innocently. "Two suns... so does one up all the time while the other is down?"

The two children actually laughed aloud at her and her question. They were growing up on that world. They'd been born there. Of course such a thing as thew amount of daylight and the number of suns would be something they barely gave a thought to. But Hailey had never seen any of that before. She stopped in her tracks and for a second or two she just stood staring at the children in shock, not used to being laughed at by ten year olds.

"It does get dark very late at night. It stays dark for the few hours both suns are down. The first one rises again early in the morning and of course it gets light again," the Doctor answered. The two children stopped laughing then. Evidently they had innocently assumed the young lady was only being silly, until her friend had taken her question perfectly seriously. The two young ones both looked down at the ground for a few seconds clearly regretful.

"I'm sorry for laughing," whispered one on them, still looking down.

"That's okay," Hailey replied cheerfully. For a moment she found herself overly worried that he would feel guilty about his mistake all night. "It was a silly question I suppose. I've just never seen any of this before."

The children, both smiling now, went on walking. Each of them pulling one of the visitors happily by the hands as they neared the administration building.

~DW~DW~DW~DW~

Hailey sat in the room she'd been assigned to for the night, balancing delicately on the edge of the bed and sketching aimlessly on a sheet of notebook paper. Not quite understanding why she was perched on the edge at all, she moved over to sit far more comfortably in the middle and continued to draw. Her pencil formed an abstract pattern of circles and squares on the paper. She put the paper and her drawing pencil down and looked around the room. She'd done so several times that night, but still she noticed things she hadn't yet observed.

The walls were painted white. Not those shades of color she so often saw in homes on Earth, that people called white but were really various shades of off-white. The doorframe was the little shade of beige and patterned with small slightly overlapping squares etched onto the wood before it was painted. She realized where she had subconsciously gained the inspiration for the square shapes in her doodling. The bed was made up with blue bedclothes, all perfectly coordinated. The walls were bare, and the only other furniture in the room was an empty bookcase made of dark stained wood, and a small trunk of the same color at the end of the bed.

Tired of being alone in what was meant to be the middle of the night, though she was wide awake, Hailey got up from the bed and crept to the door. The white door slid open to the left on it's own as soon as she stood in front of it. She ventured into the hall, deciding to idly explore a bit and sure by now that such a thing would not brake any rules or offend anyone. There was simply nothing really to see though. She wandered past the closed doors of several unused rooms she could only assume were very much like her own, stopped for a moment to take notice of a few somewhat lovely hallway lamps mounted on the wall on either side every few meters, and made a mental note of the stairs at the end of the hall, leading up.

There was one room that was occupied. From the room right next to her own she could see a light shining under the door. She knew this was the Doctor's room. Sure he was also still as awake as she was, she stood in front of it and knocked lightly on the door.

"Hello?" she called. "It's me."

"Hailey? Come in here," the Doctor's voice called from the other side of the door.

Finding a large white button on the wall right next to the door and noticing for the first time that every room including hers had one just like it, she pushed it lightly. The door slid open. The Doctor was busy reading intently from a large hardbound book when Hailey wandered into his room. He was sitting on his bed with the book open on his lap, and for a second he didn't bother to look up. After a very short while though he closed the book, set it aside and motioned for his companion to come in. Hailey made her way into the room quickly and let the door slide shut behind her.

"Matron Jenavie passed this book onto me earlier," the Doctor explained. "The basic points of interest in the history of Gallifrey over the last several thousand years. Well the history of this reality's version of it anyway. She insisted I should read it."

Hailey sat down on the edge of the bed. "So, how different is this version's history from our own then?"

"Actually quite surprisingly it's nearly identical to our own, except that there was never a war, and there is no mention of the Daleks ever having advanced past their first several years, before they were completely destroyed."

"So, a whole race is missing from the universe and yet it made little difference? Don't big changes like that have the potential to alter all of history?"

"Of course," the Doctor said simply. "But they don't have to. It all depends on so many things I suppose. Time has so few set rules. You must know that by now better than most."

"I'm understanding that more all the time," Hailey nodded. She shivered slightly, reacting a little to the coolness of the building. She'd found the place noticeably chilly since

she'd arrived and wondered once again why no one else had so far seemed to be cold. Of course, she reminded herself, unlike the school full of full blooded Time Lords who had a much different presception of what was hot and what was cold, she tended to feel temperatures the way most humans would.

"So our friend Jenavie, why is she refered to as 'Matron'?" she asked curiously.

"Because thats basically her job, or role in society,' the Doctor explained. "She's a school matron."

"I know that. I mean though why does she have that title instead of 'educator,' or 'professor' like some of the other staff here? Is there a difference?"

"Yes. A school matron will usually teach a couple of lower level classes to the lower grades, or do whatever else they can. But mostly their role is to take care of the youngest children."

"Who takes care of the older ones?"

"I suppose they mostly just take care of each other and themselves of course. Or they call a school matron too if someone is really in need of help. For the most part though no one really takes care of them exactly."

"That's a bit sad isn't it? Or at least a bit dangerous?'

"Dangerous? No," the Doctor said. "The students here aren't like on Earth. The oldest of them are older than you. And you've taken care of yourself for years."

"It's just so different here," Hailey mused out loud.

The Doctor offered no reply at all. In fact he sat looking down at the bed covers, with a strange look on his face.

"What's the matter?" Hailey questioned.

Her friend looked at her and shook his head, making a good effort to dismiss her concerns. "Nothing's the matter, well not really. It's just... this place is so much like I remember it. I could almost be convinced we are really home only of course we aren't."

"I know it isn't really home, but it's still pretty amazing to get to see it though," Hailey said.

"This school was certainly not among my favorite places on this planet," the Doctor said quietly, obviously thinking about years long past.

Hailey remembered him telling her about a few random bits of his childhood on this planet, during the time they'd traveled together years before. She remembered the stories of the schoolyard bully, and the teaching staff that seemed determined to humiliate him every chance they got. She recalled terrible tales of the constant struggle to pass classes when a whole system had apparently decided years before which student was set to fail no matter what. Most of all she remembered clearly the stories of the fear and the threats used to make keep everyone perfectly in line, even against the better judgment of the students. Better judgment and a sense of right and wrong went right out the closest winder when faced with failure in a society success was everything.

"Surely there were a few good times here though." Hailey bounced slightly on the bed, excited as she made her very clear and obvious point. She shivered again from the chill of the room, unable to help it but wanting nevertheless to continue chatting with her friend.

The Doctor got up for a moment and lifted the lid of the wooden storage trunk at the end of the bed. Hailey noticed for the first time just how much their two rooms were alike. She easily imagined now that each room in that hallway had t same perfectly white walls, the same unused bookshelf and a wooden trunk by the bed. He pulled out a heavy blanket just a shade lighter than the bed covers. Quickly he wrapped it tightly around his companion's shoulders.

"Of course there were," he said in reference to her last comment. He started laughing as he remembered events of an impossible number of years before. "During the first few years I was housed with a group of about seven other small boys in a room with only a few other rooms in the hallway. One of those other rooms was used to house a group of little girls. During my second year, my roommates and I got into what on Earth you would call a prank war, with those poor girls. It didn't take long until the whole floor was involved. Basically boys against girls at first until it finally turned into room against room."

"It started innocently enough," he went on. "A boy from our room had caught some bugs in a jar one day during outdoor free play time. He showed them to us that night and asked what he should do with them. Someone said he should let them loose in the matron's room, but someone else said he should let them loose in one of the girls' rooms across the hall instead. That option seemed the best one, and so he did just that. We expected the girls would come running into the hallway screaming and yelling. You know, typical girl stuff. They didn't though. Turns out none of that group was afraid of bugs and creepy crawly things. They just opened window to let them out and then it seems they sat and plotted. It got worse fast. We were little Time Lord children of course, and brilliant minds can design some pretty crazy pranks to play in school hallways at night. You should have seen that little brown eyed girl's confused reaction to what she thought might have been an alien race announcing it's intent to declare war on the Time Lords, over a small radio. I'll admit I could think of other happy memorries from here, if I thought for a bit."

The two of them spent a good several minutes laughing. The Doctor picked up the big heavy book he'd been reading before and leaned over to put it on the floor nearby. The two stayed sitting together on the bed, with Hailey still wrapped up in the blanket and leaning slightly against the headboard. The Doctor sat, far more still than was typical of him, looking around with clear unease and even a hint of frustration.

No one ever should logically have been able to understand much from those limited actions. But Hailey did. Neither had ever said it to the other but both liked to think she understood him better than most people could ever hope to.

"You can't wait to blow this place?" She said. It was not quite a statement, but not quite a question either. "The school I mean, but maybe the entire planet as well. Great to be back here, or as close to real as we can get, but still..."

"That's what I do," the Doctor said slowly. "I tend to run from my own people. I've done it a few times. I never hated home. I loved my own race. Who doesn't love their own people? I was just never able to stick around for long. I think they came to know I'd always go home from time to time but I'd never stay. I'd always answer their calls for help whenever someone decided they needed it, but I was always off again quickly."

"I'm not sure you could ever stay in any one place though," Hailey said. "It's not just your own planet."

"Of course not. I love Earth too, and I'd never stay there for long at once given a choice."

"What's it really like though, being back again on a planet that's basically home, after you were so sure you'd never see it again?"

"I don't think the reality of it has really occurred to me yet. My greatest fear is that I'll wake up any minute from a dream and find my hopes crushed again."

"Me too," Hailey admitted with understanding. She looked at her friend for a moment curious now about something entirely different. "Doctor, do Time Lords dream almost every time you sleep? I do, but then I'm mixed race, and humans dream so much. What about a real Time Lord?"

"We spend so much of our sleep time dreaming too."

"What do you dream about?"

"Same kind of thing as a human I'd imagine. It's all just random and so little of it makes any sense at all. And nightmares of course. Actually it seems many Time Lords are quite prone to that sort of thing, probably because of the complexity of our minds. Likely why you have so many of yours."

"I still have those quite often," Hailey said. "Not anything about the base form and understanding of time anymore though. That I think I could easily deal with now. One night we spent traveling with that Tessilon, I dreamed about dead babies all night. Once I woke up, or so I thought, and I found the Tessilon girl's little one dead near the fire. I remember thinking the dreams earlier must have been a warning I'd slept right through. I thought it was my fault, and then I woke up for real."

The Doctor nodded his understanding, surprising her. "Your brother and sister both died before they ever lived at all. It makes sense you would dream such things from time to time."

Hailey fell silent. At that moment she didn't want to talk or even think about her family. There were times she did, but still many times she just couldn't or wouldn't. She'd come to understand not long before that she would very likely live long enough to see every human family member she would know for generations pass away before her. She'd been sad enough over that understanding at first, realizing for the first time what it must have been like for the Doctor to see so many humans over the years grow old and finally die. She'd come to accept it all, sure that she would have many decades remaining to get to know the mother she was still getting to know well. She still hadn't put into words, how she felt time itself had cheated her.

Finally she spoke again, letting her sadness fade into the back of her mind before it really found a chance to surface. "So, maybe tomorrow we could see more of the planet? Places outside of the school?"

"Perhaps," the Doctor said, keeping his answer simple.

**Notes; National novel writing month begins tomorrow, and having made up my mind to make a good attempt at taking part in it (which means having to write 50,000 words of a brand new piece of fiction,) this story is going to be very slow with it's updates for a while. In fact this even I hurried through my final edit on this chapter so that I could post it for you before disappearing from the wonderful world of fanfiction tomorrow to attempt to do the impossible. **

**I will try to get one more chapter up during the month of November, but with NaNoWriMo taking up a lot of my writing time I can't promise anything for sure. I can promise though to catch up and post several chapters during the month of December. We can all only do the best we can right? =D **

**Please R&R though. Your reviews are motivation to keep on writing.**


	10. Chapter 10

**I'm back! Due to a series of things happening, I ended up away from this stroy for half a year instead of the month I planned on. Hopefully you will still want to read it. I will keep on updating now again for a while. I'm trying to pick it up from where I left it and my hope is that worked well enough. **

Hailey had well imagined that she and Maralee would become decent friends quickly. They had after all certainly gotten along well enough during the short time the bus had been stranded in another universe. But it so quickly become quite apparent that Maralee had many of her own friends already at the school and many of them were less than fully accepting of the visiting outsider with so much outside influence. All of the oldest students from the once stranded bus seemed to be in the same situation, once they were home.

Much to Hailey's great surprise the tiny girl, Lyna-Melie, became the one that talked to her and showed her the school and her own little world on the large and still little understood planet. The girl could speak so well, Hailey discovered quickly, as soon as the child had overcome her initial shyness. The tiny girl was more help than expected with the number system Hailey was having such trouble mastering.

"Where is Earth?" Lyna-Melie asked one afternoon a few days after the bus misfortune. She sat with Hailey under the silver leaves of an ancient tree, and looked up the sky with the wonder of any child.

"So far away it's not quiet common knowledge on this world," Hailey answered. For a moment she felt slightly sad at imagining the planet she'd grown up on so far away and not even heard of.

"You come from an alternative universe too," the child chattered on, thinking fast. "Your Earth must be farther than it would seem at first. Do you suppose, come to think of it, that there is an Earth in this reality? I wonder how much like your home it would be. Clearly this world took a different path in your universe. I wonder how yours did in this one."

Hailey blinked a couple of times, saying nothing and trying to wrap her head around everything the child had said. She could understand what she was saying of course, and the concept made complete sense. But to hear that sort of complex thought from an eight year old was still nevertheless shocking. For a moment she found herself nearly intimidated by the mind power of her own people.

"What are you going to be when you grow up?" the Time Lord child asked after a few moments of silence.

Hailey laughed a little at that. "I'm already grown up."

The child looked disbelieving. "How old are ya' then?"

"Twenty six."

Lyna-Melie considered for a moment. Finally she said slowly and thoughtfully, "that's not all that old at all. There are many students older than that. Why hurry to be grown up if you don't have to be. You get to live to be hundreds of years old."

Hailey laughed. "True. But really it's not so simple. Now that I've grown up and lived an adult life, I can't just go back to childhood. Even if it is late childhood."

"Too big a step backward then?"

"Well... yes."

"I like childhood."

"Of course you do," Hailey said, laughing again. "You're eight years old."

"So you already have your job then?" asked Lyna-Melie. "Since on earth you are already grown up?"

Hailey nodded her head.

The child looked at her with wide eyed interest. "So, what do you do."

"I've been a pub waitress, and then a shop clerk. Now I'm out to save the world every few weeks with the universe's greatest adventurer."

The little Time Lord girl shrugged both shoulders with far less interest then Hailey had expected. "Hmm... neat."

"So what are going to be then?"

The girl's eyes lit with with excitement and she flew into a flurry of fast chatter. "I want to be a time and dimensional operations engineer. That's a whole big field of course and there are jobs within it to specialize in. I know I want to work with time ships and their fine tuned programming. So basically teaching time ships how to think in a way."

The little girl paused for a second, looked at Hailey and laughed before she went right on again. "Our time ships are alive you know. Well not in the way you and I are alive but still living consciousnesses to some complex degree. They can learn to think. Basically people teach them so much before they are given over to their crews to fly. But then you knew that..."

"Yeah."

"Some people tend to think that the job of teaching the ships like that is too thankless and without recognition. In our world everyone wants to be seen as important and high and mighty. But I like the ships. They are smart in their own way. Did you know that each one has it's own personality? Teaching them enough can take so many years. They pretty much need to learn how to learn for themselves. It takes so much patience. But still I want to do that job."

At some point during her excited speech, the child had jumped to her feet. She now sat back down under the tree. Hailey laughed again.

~DW~DW~DW~DW~DW~

The Doctor sat alone in the school guest room he had been assigned to use while on the planet. The white walls with their fancy white painted moldings and the simple beige carpet, were nothing like his room back on his ship. The blue covers on the bed were too perfect, and the empty shelves and dresser too clean and uncluttered. He glanced to the window high up on the wall, and behind it's open blue curtains, but he could not see much through it. Of course he couldn't see much through the window he reminded himself in both frustration and amusement. His room was in the school's basement, and the window was so high up. He thought of wandering down the hall to Hailey's assigned room, but he was quite sure she wasn't in hers.

He got up from the bed he had been sitting on to read, tossed his book aside, and walked quickly to the window. Once closer and looking up he could a clear view across the campus. He and Hailey were housed in rooms below the main school building, but there were several others of slightly more interest than that one. Across a grassy clearing and couple of stone pathways, stood one of the dormitory buildings. Next to it, across another narrow stone path was the huge gym and auditorium structure. Across the school grounds, among the brick buildings with their elaborate sloping metal roofs, ran students of all ages and sizes and all dressed in identical and perfectly clean and pressed clothing. He didn't like the place anymore than than he had so many centuries before and though it was an entirely different reality, the place looked exactly like it had back in the days of his own childhood.

Just so typical of his own people, even in this reality, he mused to himself. Hundreds of years allowed to go by without so much as a single change to something as important as a school, just for the vary sake of change. He doubted the roofs would even be looked over unless they sprung a leak somewhere. He had for got just how greatly his people were set in their ways and resistant of change in any way.

A slight knock at the door dragged from from his reflecting and before he could even turn to answer the knocking, Hailey entered the room. She sat down in the chair at the desk in the corner, after turning it backward to face out to the room.

"Doctor?" she questioned after a moment in which he said nothing to her at all. "What's the matter?"

The Doctor stepped back from the window. "Sorry Hailey. Nothing's the matter. I'm fine. Just... thinking."

"Thinking hey? Well that must be where all the smoke is coming from."

"Very funny."

"Hahaha, I try." Hailey laughed. She tilted the chair backwards a bit against the front of the desk. "Seriously though, thinking about what?"

"I met with a few members of the senate today. It seems the matron contacted them yesterday about us and the idea of the now missing alternate version of this planet."

Hailey's heart sunk for a second at that. "Oh wow. You aren't in serious trouble now are you?"

"No, no. Remember, we are a race that can see possibilities, and not quite manifesting time-lines constantly. Several moments consideration after hearing my side of things and it all made sense to them somehow. Besides it's not their world. There isn't much attachment to it here because they've got this one."

"That's a bit sad in a way."

"In a way, yes it is. But a good thing in the current situation, all things considered."

"True."

"We've been invited to stay here," the Doctor said, after a slight moment of silence in which they both considered their own thoughts. "I've been offered a teaching job here at the school, of all things."

"Stay here?" Hailey questioned. "Well are you going to accept the offer?"

"That's a complicated situation. See, for years now I was the only Time Lord left in the universe... well not counting you of course, but I met you later. It was so lonely for so long, just finding myself alone. Now there is a planet of our people again, I could stay and make a life here if I wanted... and all I can think of is the same old wish to run away from home. Just like the old days, when I ran because I could.

Hailey considered for a second or two. Finally she said, " I think that makes perfect sense though. "You've only even said you wished you had your people around and alive again. You never said you wanted to stay home if you could. It makes sense that you would run off again with little guilt about doing so, because now of course you've got a home to return to when you want to. Just like the old days."

"It still shocks me sometimes how well you actually manage to understand my reasoning."

"Doctor, I've been thinking," Hailey said next. Her tone and changed and her face had taken on a look of good and serious consideration over something huge. One look at her in the second and the Doctor knew without a second thought that this would not be a good thing at all. Nevertheless, he boldly gestured for her to go on speaking.

"The time war never happened here," Hailey said with excitement. "So this version of Gallifrey never had it's people frantically trying to save their children or run for their lives. Everything is as it should be... and my dad is probably still alive somewhere."

The Doctor stood for several long seconds, frozen where he stood in panic and disbelief. No, no, no! He ranted in his mind. Why was it that sooner or later it seemed every parent-less companion he knew eventually decided to look for her parent in an alternate universe or time period? Why was it exactly that he could vaguely recall a nearly Earth destroying time based disaster, caused by a similar attempt for a companion years before?

He shook he head for a second, thinking hard. He realized in a second that that had been different in the case. It was Earth and time itself had been upset by the survival of someone that was meant to be dead. Gallifrey held the time vibration itself, and besides they were not saving any lives, just looking for an already surviving man. He nearly slapped himself in the next second. Why, he wondered in frustration, was he even considering this? In the next second he'd turned to look Hailey firmly in the eyes.

He was about to tell her that was impossible, and dangerous. he was about to explain exactly what had happened the last time someone had suddenly decided she should know who her father could have been. He was ready to let her down and claim that he was doing the safe thing. But one more look at her face, now hopeful and excited, and he found himself speechless. In the name of the universe itself, he raged silently, why was it exactly that he never could seem to say no to his companions?

"We can look for him," he said with some lingering doubts. "But with every possible safety protocol in place. I've got somewhat of a bad history with meeting dead parents. If for whatever reason he is dead in this time-line too, well we can't just try to save him, but of course you know that. You're a Time Lord student. Someone tried that by accident once and nearly destroyed the Earth as a result. And remember that he is not really your father. Yours is dead with our varsion of this planet. We are simply looking for what could have been, as far as we are concerned."

Hailey nodded, grinning with the excitement of a new discovery.

The Doctor went on speaking, quickly. "There's a good chance in this reality he never went to Earth, and never met your mother. If he didn't, he will have no idea at all who you are or why you are looking for him. This varsions may not even know what Earth is. So many of the people here don't"

"I know."

The Doctor ran toward the door of his room, stopping for a second to pull Hailey to her feet and drag her quickly behind him at running speed. "Well then, off we go."

**Oh...kay! I have no idea whatsoever where that ending to the chapter came from. Originally I had no intention of bringing James (Hailey's father) back at all. Well it does seem this one is taking it's own direction again. let's see where it leads, shall we. **


End file.
